First, I acknowledge my colleague Harold Schweizer, the title of whose recent book I have brazenly stolen for this post--thanks, Harold!
I am waiting. I am waiting for lots of things. Beginning and end of life things, like the births of assorted babies I will soon know and the death of my beloved father-in-law, who is dying so well I keep suggesting he should quick run some seminars for other old folks on the art of dying. I am waiting for some interesting work responsibilities to begin and for some less interesting ones to end. I am waiting for my sabbatical and the move to Barcelona that will come with it. I am waiting to read A Wind in the Door with my oldest son and The Chamber of Secrets with my younger kids. I am waiting for the picture book snow storm that this cold winter has not yet brought us, and I am also waiting for it to be warmer and to be able to walk out of the house without layering and layering first. I am waiting for the Lost premiere and the Oscars and the Percy Jackson movie.
Most of all, in this moment, I am waiting to hear from the agent who is currently reading the first 50 pages of This Powerful Rhyme. This particular agent has every reason to be unusually busy right now, and she has no obligation to respond to me quickly. However, a flurry of e-mails a couple of weeks ago led me to hope for a quick response. I think that no news is just no news, neither good nor bad, but it's hard not to devote lots of mental energy to imagining her response to my book. While I wait, I imagine enthusiasm and criticisms, contracts and rejections, friendships and starting over. Waiting is not passive or empty but one of the most active imaginative acts we experience.
In my fiction and my scholarly writing, I return again and again to the matter of time and the relationship between the present and the past. Waiting is a psychological limbo that inhabits the space between present and future. The knowledge that something will come or might come and the feeling of that something's absence. This is complex and fascinating: how can we feel the absence of something we've not yet had? Anticipation is the imagining of the presence of something in our lives. Sometimes we anticipate (read: dread) something we don't want in our lives, and sometimes we anticipate things we do want. In both cases, we wait for a future we imagine, and we work around the perceived absence of the fiction of what the future will hold.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Queen Victoria and Blogging
Today was the first day of classes this semester at Bucknell, and I met both my classes: Victorian Literature and Culture in the morning and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers in the afternoon. The C19 Women Writers is an advanced seminar and so I asked them to do a short reading assignment for the first day of class: the aim being to introduce stereotypes and immediately break them down and thus elevate our discussion from the get go. To this end, we read some material by and about Queen Victoria.
Victoria is a fascinating figure in many ways, but for the purposes of this class, I wanted us to focus on the fact that while we might imagine most Victorian women resented the restrictions placed on them by society, Victoria, the one women who could have thrown off those restrictions, chose to live with them, chose to subordinate herself to her husband, chose a simple, middle-class, domestic life.
The conversation went in a direction I didn't anticipate, though. We talked about how difficult it is to know what she really wanted or felt or even what her life was really like. Her image was carefully managed and probably carefully constructed, so even when we read her private letters to her daughter, we can detect her awareness of her image and observe how she manages that image.
And this is where blogging comes in. A blog, in my view, is an odd form at once private and public. That is, we write blogs hoping they will be read not just by friends but probably also by strangers, yet in tone and content they are often cousins to the journal or to the old-fashioned letter. As I write this now, I am pretty sure no one will read it, but when I am finished, I will click "publish post" and doing so is an acknowledgement that I am making this post public. Someone might read it. Victoria wrote letters to her daughter first and foremost for her daughter, but given her position and her evident media savvy, she likely anticipated that her letters would one day be published. So her private correspondence is haunted by the prospect of becoming public, and so she surely must have modulated her comments, her attitudes, her image with that prospect in mind.
A blogger must be sympathetic to her plight, a writer who crafts personal sentences in a space that appears private but is really public. I am appreciating for the first time what a peculiar genre a blog post is, and it is Queen Victoria who illuminated this peculiarity for me.
Victoria is a fascinating figure in many ways, but for the purposes of this class, I wanted us to focus on the fact that while we might imagine most Victorian women resented the restrictions placed on them by society, Victoria, the one women who could have thrown off those restrictions, chose to live with them, chose to subordinate herself to her husband, chose a simple, middle-class, domestic life.
The conversation went in a direction I didn't anticipate, though. We talked about how difficult it is to know what she really wanted or felt or even what her life was really like. Her image was carefully managed and probably carefully constructed, so even when we read her private letters to her daughter, we can detect her awareness of her image and observe how she manages that image.
And this is where blogging comes in. A blog, in my view, is an odd form at once private and public. That is, we write blogs hoping they will be read not just by friends but probably also by strangers, yet in tone and content they are often cousins to the journal or to the old-fashioned letter. As I write this now, I am pretty sure no one will read it, but when I am finished, I will click "publish post" and doing so is an acknowledgement that I am making this post public. Someone might read it. Victoria wrote letters to her daughter first and foremost for her daughter, but given her position and her evident media savvy, she likely anticipated that her letters would one day be published. So her private correspondence is haunted by the prospect of becoming public, and so she surely must have modulated her comments, her attitudes, her image with that prospect in mind.
A blogger must be sympathetic to her plight, a writer who crafts personal sentences in a space that appears private but is really public. I am appreciating for the first time what a peculiar genre a blog post is, and it is Queen Victoria who illuminated this peculiarity for me.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
This Powerful Rhyme
This Powerful Rhyme is a middle-grade realist fantasy. It is my first novel. It's been in the works for some time but has suddenly transformed from a sort of pet project to a wonderfully, terrifyingly real venture. I queried two agents about ten days ago, and both of them asked to see more of the manuscript. Both are very good agencies, and I'm unlikely to get picked up by either, but to get their interest is staggeringly wonderful and surprising. So, I find myself wondering how to talk to agents and how transparent to be (I've decided to be totally transparent), and I've actually taken a little time to start educating myself about literary contracts, should I get so lucky.
I have spent so much time hanging out in a completely different part of the book world. That is, the part populated with professional readers. As I get ready for a new semester and spend some of my last precious hours of winter break reading novels for my classes, I am aware that I am still very much a professional reader. But, I am starting to feel something like a professional writer, too.
My oldest son is upstairs reading my novel on my kindle as I write this. I've tested parts of it on him over the past year, but he has never just read the book through. Tonight he announced he wanted to read it. I don't know if he'll love it, but I'm so happy that his bedtime reading tonight is by me!
I have spent so much time hanging out in a completely different part of the book world. That is, the part populated with professional readers. As I get ready for a new semester and spend some of my last precious hours of winter break reading novels for my classes, I am aware that I am still very much a professional reader. But, I am starting to feel something like a professional writer, too.
My oldest son is upstairs reading my novel on my kindle as I write this. I've tested parts of it on him over the past year, but he has never just read the book through. Tonight he announced he wanted to read it. I don't know if he'll love it, but I'm so happy that his bedtime reading tonight is by me!
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Texts That Trouble Us
Yesterday, I read the student comments on the evaluations from my Young Adult Fiction class, and I was annoyed by one comment in particular: a student wrote that s/he liked most of the books, except The Golden Compass, which was too hard, and The Graveyard Book, which was too scary. Initially, I think this annoyed me because college students shouldn't find any books in a Young Adult Fiction class "too hard," but as I thought more deeply about this comment, I realized it bothers me for a more complicated reason.
I teach a lot of books that are hard, but most of them are books students expect to be hard, like Middlemarch, and the comment reveals that some students (probably most) don't expect books written for young readers to be hard. But shouldn't these books be hard, too? Shouldn't young readers get to relish the thrill of a complex plot, a complex moral landscape, even a complex sentence? Life troubles us in small and large ways, and whether books take us into fantastical or realistic places, those books should explore life's troubles. A book that is nothing more than an escape has a place, but it does nothing to prepare readers, young or old, to face life and the troubles that await. A book that is hard enriches its readers, and I am very sorry that I failed to convey that vital element of literature to even one of my students.
I teach a lot of books that are hard, but most of them are books students expect to be hard, like Middlemarch, and the comment reveals that some students (probably most) don't expect books written for young readers to be hard. But shouldn't these books be hard, too? Shouldn't young readers get to relish the thrill of a complex plot, a complex moral landscape, even a complex sentence? Life troubles us in small and large ways, and whether books take us into fantastical or realistic places, those books should explore life's troubles. A book that is nothing more than an escape has a place, but it does nothing to prepare readers, young or old, to face life and the troubles that await. A book that is hard enriches its readers, and I am very sorry that I failed to convey that vital element of literature to even one of my students.
Monday, January 4, 2010
My Tri-Polar Intellectual Life
Academia comes with two lovely limbos--early January and mid-May. Public school is in session (so my kids are occupied all day), but the university is still idling along with students gone, offices empty and corridors so cold and unwelcoming that the buildings themselves seem to say, "Stay at home. Curl up on the couch, while you still can..." Spring semester classes start in just over two weeks, so it's not a long limbo, but it is a nice one.
Still, there is work to be done, and today I worked on three stunningly different projects. I plotted out the syllabus for a new seminar on nineteenth-century women writers, I hurriedly put together an application for research funding for my sabbatical project, and I sent a query to an agent who I hope might choose to represent my novel. It felt good to get all of these projects done, but they are so different from each other that I also feel a confused sense of professional identity. Add to the mix taking down the Christmas tree and volunteering in my kindergarten twins' classroom for an hour, and I guess I have to go with Quin-Polar, which sounds like a fantasy about a post-apocalyptic frozen landscape.
Still, there is work to be done, and today I worked on three stunningly different projects. I plotted out the syllabus for a new seminar on nineteenth-century women writers, I hurriedly put together an application for research funding for my sabbatical project, and I sent a query to an agent who I hope might choose to represent my novel. It felt good to get all of these projects done, but they are so different from each other that I also feel a confused sense of professional identity. Add to the mix taking down the Christmas tree and volunteering in my kindergarten twins' classroom for an hour, and I guess I have to go with Quin-Polar, which sounds like a fantasy about a post-apocalyptic frozen landscape.
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