Category: observations/thoughts (Page 1 of 11)

Creative Writing: Week Two

April 9, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I told them that input could be whatever they wanted, so I have to refrain from being judgy about their choices, but after looking over their input logs from the first week, I think it might be time to talk about high-quality input versus low-quality input.

It’s a tricky subject because it reminds me too much of the snobbish position that certain kinds of literature are better than others, that comic books and video games are worthless, that pulp literature and Hollywood movies are for the unwashed masses, etc. etc. All that elitist crap.

I’m a “more/and” kind of person. A “yes” person. I like liking things, to quote Abed. And for too long, science fiction and fantasy were looked down on as “lesser-than” by the literary establishment, and I don’t want to contribute to that kind of judgment, a judgment more often born out of snobbery and cliquishness than actual merit and quality.

But. But, but, but…

There are certainly artistic avenues and byways my students could be exploring that they aren’t, and if they did explore those byways, they might find them rewarding and much more satisfying than what they are reading/watching/listening to right now.

I’m tempted, therefore, to maybe give them more required reading/viewing/listening/etc. Not a lot, but a few assignments each week that they have to engage with. “Read X by Wednesday and we’ll talk about it in class.” That kind of thing.

Yeah, I’m backtracking a little from what I said at the beginning of the term, but I think/hope it will help them see that it’s not about which art is “good” and which is “bad” so much as it’s a question of whether the art I’m inputting is expanding my life as a writer or limiting it. If it’s limiting/narrowing/same-old-same-old, then what’s the point? A kind of familiar numbness? The comfort of hearing my old notions parroted back to me? Inertia?

Or is it that they don’t know what else is out there? If I’m going to assign better input experiences for them, then I need to meet them where they are. Maybe something like the book recommendations John Warner does? They give me a list of their last five input experiences and I put together a list of five more to explore that are of a potentially better quality. It’s worth a shot.

We’ll be watching Richard Linklater’s School of Rock in Week Three, partially because I want to introduce the concept of going back and exploring the influences of those who influence you.

I feel like I’m only in Week Two and the year is almost over. These quarter-long classes we do at my school just don’t feel like enough time, especially this fourth quarter with senioritis hitting hard and Easter and all the random days off and schedule changes. There’s SO MUCH we could be doing in this Creative Writing class. If I am going to teach it next year, I’ll need to scale back my ambitions for the class considerably. At the moment, there’s too much I want to do and no time in which to do it.

I need to repeat my mantra from the beginning of the year: “Slow learning.”

We don’t have to do it all. We can leave a few chips on the table. We can do less. We can go deeper on the things that matter for us right now, not some predetermined schedule.

I need to remember that. I’m building a space for them to write creatively and develop ideas and skills. It takes time to build that space, and maybe we only start to build it together, and it’s up to each student to finish building it on her own (or with each other, after the last bell has rung on the school year).

Whenever I want to do too much, I end up regretting it.

For now, we’re looking at input. Better quality. Exploring influences. Finding the good stuff that will expand your imagination. Leaving the stuff that limits you.

I’ll go down this road with the students until I feel like we’ve gotten what we need. Then we’ll move on. Maybe that’s by the end of Week Three, maybe it’s by the end of Week Four. Maybe we stay on this for the rest of the school year — IF it’s yielding fruit and helping us all grow.

Otherwise, we can keep going down the road: going slow, but going beyond the surface of things.

The “Morning Routine” is cliche at this point, but it still works

April 3, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I hesitate to write about morning routines because I feel like at this point, all the gurus have spoken (often annoyingly), it’s gotten cliche to spout off about how important one’s morning routine is, and we’ve heard the advice ad nauseam so what more is there to say?

And yet, I have been thinking once again about why I’ve been floundering since mid-December, and the answer is crystal clear: It’s my faltering morning routine.

From early August until the end of November, my morning routine had been relatively steady (I even managed a modified version of it while visiting family over the Thanksgiving holiday), and even though my writing output wasn’t huge in that span, I was writing consistently and enjoyably. Life was in balance.

Then December hit, Christmas prepping and end-of-semester-grading took over my life, and the morning routine was decimated. I tried to get back on track in January, but to no avail. I couldn’t get to bed on time, and in the morning, sleep felt more important than writing, so I would snooze until it was time to get my kids ready for school.

And now, here I am in April, and I’m grumbling about how out of sync I feel, how paltry my creative output has been, and how, frankly, depressed I’m getting.

It’s the lack of a morning routine!

I’ve known it the whole time, but for some reason I had convinced myself that perhaps my life was too unpredictable to commit to a regular morning routine and I’d be better off sneaking my writing in whenever I could, doing my art whenever the small snatches of time presented themselves. Planning didn’t seem to be working, so I would be more spontaneous.

But spontaneous is just another word for not getting shit done. Without a rhythm, without a routine, I never was able to find those snatches of time. My output nosedived.

Here’s the thing: it wasn’t that planning didn’t work. It was that I had given up on committing to the plan. I wanted my sleep (I still do, of course). And I figured it was too hard to get to bed at 10:00 p.m. My life wouldn’t let me. I had to face reality. Blah, blah, blah.

But what I was facing wasn’t reality. It was my own resignation in the face of a challenge. I had given up and soothed myself by saying it was pragmatism.

It wasn’t pragmatism. It was a reluctance to make changes. To turn off the screens and go to bed even if there were other things I wanted to do. The real reality is that we have to make choices, and from December to April, I had been making the choice to stay up later and not wake up early to do my morning routine. This was a choice I was making. I didn’t have to read one more online article after 9:00 p.m., but I did. I didn’t have to watch a second episode of that TV show, but I did. I didn’t have to put off my paper-grading all day so that I had a stack of them to grade at night, but I did.

These were choices. They still are choices I must face each and every day. But if I want to establish my morning routine again, then I must make different choices. Some things, yes, are always out of our control. I can’t control when my child has a nightmare and needs me to sit with him in his bedroom. I can’t control those nights when we get home late from visiting family and I have to stay up late to make the lunches and wash dishes.

But on typical nights, those normal nights when I have more control over my choices and time, I can start making the choice for the morning routine — the routine that gives my life balance and structure and health — over the choice for one more episode, one more article, one more paper to grade.

If it’s at all interesting to others, my morning routine consists of waking up at 6:00 a.m. and immediately doing stretches in bed to help with my back problems and muscle stiffness. Then I get up, drink a glass of water and take vitamins, and then begin walking around the house for exercise. While I walk, I usually pray. If it’s light enough outside, I might walk outside, but usually it’s too dark for that.

After my walk and prayer time, I do my Julia Cameron-style morning pages in my notebook, and then I do some creative writing, either fiction or nonfiction or poetry, whatever feels right and I’m most excited about.

By this time, I have to get ready for work, so I shower, pack the kids’ lunches, eat breakfast, and head to work with enough time to grade papers for thirty minutes before my first class period starts.

This is the ideal morning routine for me. In this three-hour span, I’m able to exercise, pray, reflect, write creatively, eat breakfast, and make progress on my teaching job, so that by 9:00 a.m., I have accomplished all the important things I need to accomplish for the day related to my health, my spiritual life, my art, and my job.

After 9:00 a.m., if I’ve done my morning routine, whatever else gets accomplished throughout the day, I can feel good knowing I did the things I needed to do to make myself feel whole.

Maybe some of the gurus would say my routine is too ambitious, and that’s why I fell off the wagon.

Maybe.

But over the years, I’ve trained myself to become more and more of a morning person, and as I get older, I know that by the time the afternoon hits, I’m too tired both physically and mentally to be effective at my creative work. The best time for me is the morning. Before the day has had a chance to drain me. So I need to get several things done in the morning because my health, my spiritual life, my art, and my job are all things I need to keep in balance for an ordered, satisfying life.

And if that means I need to wake up at 5:30 a.m. and go to bed at 9:30 p.m., then maybe I need to start making the choices that will allow me to do that. But it all comes down to choices, to what I value, and where I focus my time.

Not everything is under my control. Life will have bumps and setbacks.

But the morning routine — for me, at least — really does work as a tool and structure for making my art. I’ve noticed a huge plummet of happiness and artistic fulfillment since I floundered in my morning routine. And in just the past two days, since I’ve been trying to reestablish that routine, I’ve noticed a huge upswing in my mood and ability to get creative work done.

Reminding myself that the morning routine really does work, and that it’s worth making different choices at night, may be cliche to write about, but I wouldn’t have had the energy or time to write this blog post without my morning routine.

I’ll take the cliche every time if it means I get to make my art again and keep myself whole.

Why Castles and Knights and Dragons? Beats me.

February 24, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Recently, a student asked why I like the Middle Ages so much.

This was in a short fiction elective, and we’d been reading lots of genres, some sci-fi, some fantasy, some realistic, some fairy tale-ish, some Southern Gothic, some suspense. During one of our discussions, we somehow came around to my particular tastes as a reader, and I said that I’ve always been drawn to stories about the past, particularly the medieval period in world history, and one student spoke up, a bit bemused, asking why.

“Because for as long as I can remember, I’ve like that era,” was what I said, which isn’t a good answer.

Why do you like something?

Well, because I always have.

Not a good answer. Circular reasoning. But I didn’t have any answer to give. Why did my tastes develop the way they did? Was it the media I consumed as a young child that influenced me? Was it something genetic, something intrinsic to my personality?

I honestly don’t know. But for as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to stories with knights and castles and forests and monsters. Sometimes those stories were older than medieval (Greek myths preoccupied a lot of my late-elementary years), sometimes they weren’t medieval at all (I had quite an obsession with both Oz and Candyland as a wee youngster), but even if I strayed at times from Ye Olde Medieval Times, I always returned to knights and castles and forests and monsters eventually.

It might have been the media I consumed, the stuff floating in the air. The 1980s were a time when medieval fantasy was emerging as viable mass entertainment: the Conan movies, Red Sonja, Dungeons & Dragons, Legend of Zelda, etc.

As a kid, I was devoted to shows like The Gummi Bears, and to movies like The Princess Bride and Labyrinth (neither of which is strictly “medieval,” but they’ve got some of the trappings, i.e.: castles, goblins, sword fights, kingdoms), and when Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves came out, I was ALL IN. I had the action figures, the soundtrack, and the ticket stubs to show my devotion.

I also had books, like Rosemary Suttcliffe’s Arthurian novels for young readers. And the Endless Quest D&D books. And Narnia. And The Hobbit. And the Prydain Chronicles.

Going to my first Renaissance Festival as an eight-year-old cemented this obsession. Once you’ve wielded a wooden sword from the Renaissance Festival, there’s no going back.

Basically, there was a lot of medieval-ish stuff in the world for kids in the eighties and early nineties. I was exposed to a lot of it, and I loved it.

But why did I love it? That’s the thing I can’t explain. Not every child who grew up in America back then ended up loving the Middle Ages. Not every child who traipsed around the local Ren Fest ended up loving the Middle Ages. Not every kid who saw Conan grew up to be obsessed with sword and sorcery, and not every pre-teen who watched Kevin Costner shoot a bow and arrow ended up loving the Middle Ages as much as me.

What gives?

I didn’t have a good answer for my student, and I still don’t. She made it quite clear that she finds all this medieval stuff to be boring as hell, and I told her that’s great. Different strokes for different folks. The world would be boring if we all liked the exact same thing all the time.

But why do we like what we like? How much is driven by innate personality and how much is driven by outside influence? Nature vs. nurture, etc.

I can try to explain why I love the Middle Ages to my student, why I’m drawn to it, but those explanations won’t really have an impact on her. She’s not interested (nor does she need to be), and my enthusiasm won’t make her enthused, no matter how passionate my defense.

I do think it’s interesting that she was so curious to know. My love of the Middle Ages was so foreign to her experience that she was driven to seek an answer, to get an explanation. For her, my love of the medieval period was as strange as my love for black coffee. She was mystified by my tastes, as I often am by people who take an interest in Real Housewives or eat Velveeta cheese.

But that’s just it. Taste is taste. We can’t explain it, not fully. We can hunt for past experiences, for childhood affinities, for memories and upbringing to explain it, but when it comes to it, our tastes are what they are, and it’s no use arguing someone out of their tastes nor for arguing someone into your tastes.

We can share. We can gush and be enthusiastic, and maybe that will get others curious, maybe help them explore something unfamiliar and strange. Who knows, maybe several years from now, this same student will remember my passion for the Middle Ages and become curious enough to read the Brother Cadfael Chronicles, or The Once and Future King, or Beowulf, or whatever.

Or not.

There’s no explanation for taste. It’s a kind of alchemy, but it’s also a kind of magic. The spell either works or it doesn’t.

Or maybe, eventually, it does. When we least expect it. The heart wants what the heart wants.

And my heart — now and then and hopefully always — wants castles and knights and swords and dragons.

Don’t Call It a Resolution

January 4, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I’m hoping to blog more in 2024. I have an idea for a series of posts about board games, and since this term I’m teaching British Lit, Short Fiction (which will mostly entail reading short SFF stories with my students), and Creative Writing, I figure I’ll have a few things to say about writing, literature, and the fantastical as it pertains to my work in the classroom.

For Brit Lit this semester, my focus is on monsters. We’ll start with Beowulf, then The Tempest (and perhaps A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth too), and finally Shelley’s Frankenstein. What makes something a monster? Are monsters made or born? How does our idea of the monstrous change over time?

Mostly I wanted to teach these three texts, so I created a driving question to link them all. But mostly, I just wanted to read them with my students. I’m curious to see their reactions, especially for Beowulf, which is always a harder sell in an all-girls school. I mean, I’m a woman and I love Beowulf, but when I’ve taught it to young women in the past, it’s been a mixed reaction. The only major female character is a monstrous fen-hag, and the other women in the story serve as peacemakers and such (to solidify alliances and end blood-feuds), so I get why for some of the young women I teach, there’s not much to engage them.

But I’m hoping some of them will come to love the action, the world-building, and the overall spirit of the poem. I myself read it in high school (part of it anyway), and I’ve loved Beowulf ever since.

I’m not making any kind of resolution to blog everyday or anything. Not that such a goal is bad; I’ve attempted every-day blogging before and it was great. But I can’t meet such a challenge this year, nor do I really want to. I’m more focused on staying consistent with my fiction writing and increasing my word count in that realm. But I still like blogging and don’t want it falling dormant. Thus, my commitment to a more regular blogging habit for 2024.

Maybe once a week? Maybe once every two weeks? Maybe several times a week? I don’t have firm plans as of yet. I’m waiting to see how these first few weeks of January shake out, how much time I can actually find to blog more frequently, and how easy it is to find topics to write about. As I mentioned earlier, I have plans, but maybe those plans aren’t tenable. Time will tell.

One of my biggest goals/ambitions for this new year, on a personal level, is to finally start playing more of the board games and role-playing games that adorn my shelves. We have an entire closet filled with board games we’ve (mostly) never played. This is so frustrating! I LOVE board games, and yet here in my very house there languishes a collection of sundry entertainments and diversions of which I have never availed myself. This is madness!

I plan to correct such mismanagement by taking one game out each week and learning to play it. I may play it with husband or friends, or I may play solo, but either way, I’m committing myself to playing the board games in my house. Carpe diem and all that.

I’m going to try blogging about the games too; I just need a snappy name to call this “regular” feature. (I have “The Things That Shaped Me” feature which I should also get back to, but maybe I’ll call my board game excursion “Cabinet of Curiosities” or something of that sort… which I know is already a tag on my blog, but this will just make it more official.)

Anyway, I’m not calling any of this a “resolution.” I make New Year’s resolutions, and I’ve already made a few in other realms of my life for 2024, so I’m not opposed to resolutions in general. But I’m not making a blogging resolution this year. Nothing that firm. This blogging commitment is more of a New Year’s inclination. An urge to blog more. Let’s see how it shakes out.

Alternative December

December 15, 2023 / / 0 Comments

As December rolls along, my house continues to think it’s mid-October. There are no wreaths out, no tree, no decorations of any sort. It’s the fifteenth-of-fucking-December and there is still no Advent calendar on our wall. The only thing going for us is that the Glade plugin is pine-scented.

Every year, the same thing happens. I drive around town at 7:30 p.m. to get more medicine from CVS, hoping to stave off the fevers of at least two children, and I’m confronted with all the beauty of sparkling houses decorated with lights and lawn reindeer, a merry reminder that my house is the Scrooge on the block, the one place that still has an artificial jack-o-lantern on the porch that probably doesn’t even work anymore.

Last year was the exception to my mid-December lack-o-Christmas-cheer because last year I didn’t really work at a normal (any) job in December, so I had free time to put the Advent wreath out and dust the piano and maybe put out one of our three nativity sets. Last year still had sick kids up the wazoo, but at least I had the tree decorated and a couple of presents wrapped.

This year is a return to the mean. I’m working full-time again — teaching — thus it’s-end-of-the-term-and-grading-is-all-I-do-now mode has been activated, and I can barely blink to figure out which day it is, let alone figure out how to make my living room livable enough to put up decorations.

This time around, this December fifteenth, while driving home and enjoying other people’s Christmas lights, I realized there will never be a time (until my kids are grown, maybe, or we win the lotto) when I won’t be running around like a lunatic in December, stressed out of my gourd and barely hanging on. There will never be a time when my house will be gingerbready and ready for Christmas weeks in advance. (I’ll be happy with DAYS in advance, honestly.)

No, I will always be living my alternative Christmas. I will always be last-minuting the mistletoe. I will always be getting the tree up just in time, and wrapping all the gifts at midnight on Christmas Eve, watching It’s a Wonderful Life and crying my eyes out and self-soothing with spiked eggnog. That is MY December twenty-fourth.

And my Advent will always be ganky. It will always be helter-skelter and mismanaged. There’s just too much to fucking do in December. Too much. School stuff and work stuff and house stuff and illnesses. OMG the illnesses! Everyone cycles through three rounds of illness every flippin’ November/December now apparently. Apparently that’s a thing in my life for perpetuity or until my kids run off to college (or the circus). Apparently everyone must get sick in early December; it’s like an iron-clad rule. Everyone but me, apparently, which, I must admit, is a small but very grateful mercy.

I realized as I was driving home tonight and feeling bad about my lack of Getting All the Shit Done skillz, that I will always be living this alternative Christmas. My Decembers will always be wracked by chaos. I will never not be having hair on fire. This disordered life IS my life.

And then I sighed. A wave of relief washed over me. I’m living an alternative Christmas. I’m not like the rest of you, with your house lights and your tree up and your Christmas parties and whatnot. I’m living my own Christmas season, my own messed up Advent, my very own alternative seat-of-the-pants-flying-rodeo that is a blur and a burden, but hey-o, it’s MY burden. This is how I do Christmas. Not very nice, not very naughty either, just… well, it’s just how I do it.

It’s not my preferred way. Boy, howdy is it not my preferred way!

But it’s my way. My life and no other.

I need to accept it, embrace it, even love it. Kinda. Sorta. Maybe “love” is too strong a word. But something love-ish. Something that goes beyond acceptance into a kind of okay-ness.

It’s okay that I have literally no decorations up yet. It’s okay that I’m still behind on my end-of-term grading. And it’s okay if I don’t sign-up for something to send into my kids’ classes for their holiday parties next week. It’s all okay. It’s still Christmas even if I never put up the tree.

(Don’t worry, I’m putting up the tree. It’s just, it’s still okay EVEN IF I don’t. That’s all I’m saying. Christmas isn’t decorations. It isn’t cookies. It isn’t even presents. But yes, I do have presents for my kids; I’m not that horrible.)

Christmas is about the birth of Christ, celebrating the Incarnation, and kneeling in awe and wonder at the miracle of God becoming Man. No decorations or Christmas lights are required to celebrate the Light of the World.

So what if I’m horrible at Decembers? It’s how I roll. These hectic days are just the way things are. Can’t escape them, can’t solve them, can’t worry about them anymore.

As each new December comes around, I’m hoping it will the one where I turn things around. But that’s a vain hope. It’s a pressure I’m putting on myself that isn’t worth worrying about. I’m an alternative Decemberist. A free-spirit of suckitude. I’m just never gonna get my shit together.

And that’s okay.

Bradbury’s Big Ideas

November 29, 2023 / / 0 Comments

I’m teaching The Martian Chronicles again, something I haven’t done for almost a decade. I think the last time I taught a science fiction novel of any kind was 2014 or 2015 when I read Fahrenheit 451 with an Honors American Lit class (you can see my affinity for Bradbury).

Of course, the first comment I received from the students this year was, “This is WEIRD,” and yes, kids, it’s weird. It’s SCIENCE FICTION. I would think that in 2023, in America, in which we are ruled by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and in which new Star Wars and Star Trek shows spring up like daisies), a science fiction novel wouldn’t weird these students out.

But it has. We are about a third of the way through, and while they are starting to groove to Bradbury’s particular brand of magic stardust, they are still a little befuddled and bewildered by the strangeness of things. I mean, it IS a strange book, but that’s part of the fun! Science fiction’s strangeness is part of its charm, part of why I like to read it.

As I keep reminding the students, science fiction is a genre of ideas. It’s all about the Metaphors (as Bradbury liked to call them). About the Big Questions. About life and death and God and the meaning of time and the power of memories and the ways in which our imagination can wield incredible, life-altering power. It’s about the eternal stuff, the primordial stuff. The point and purpose of life.

And things have to get a little weird if we want to get to these big ideas. When we ride on Bradbury’s rocket ship, we have to be ready for wonders. After all, life and death and God are all pretty strange things. Think about them for a moment and wonder: Why did life even begin? Why did the universe become the universe? Why must things die, why not infinite growth, infinite life, etc.? Why did God make all this (if you believe in God and his creative spirit)? And if there is no God, why not? What is the meaning of things without him?

And even the more practical questions: Why do we hope to find life on other planets? Why do we want to go to other planets? What will happen if we ever meet an alien species? How will we save our own planet from the destruction we’ve wrought against it? Can it be saved? What will we do to the other planets in our solar system? What will we do to ourselves in pursuit of these things?

What is happiness? What is love? What is memory? What is time?

To play in these fields of wonder, Bradbury must write with fire and rocket fuel. I am loving the experience of rereading the novel, and I’m also enjoying how my students are reacting to it. Despite all the science fiction television and movies around them, this almost-seventy-year-old book is still knocking them around, still peeling back the layers of metaphor and thought to reveal hard questions underneath.

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