Tierney
Get Real: Representing Reality
This article is concerned with the validity of qualitative research, mostly in regard to having an objective authority, and that there are many forms of representation that should be considered, but they are difficult to define. This has led to issues with procedure and method, which is defined as ‘crisis’.
It seems to me that what’s considered the flaw of qualitative research is what actually makes it so enticing. The whole point of qualitative research is that there are many ways of knowing, and that a human, not scientific interpretation, is a more whole way to understand cultural experience.
Edmund Cusick
Working with Myth
I’m reading about myth while driving out of LA on a road-trip, and the reality of this place squashed the myths built in my mind about it all my life. It’s really not as seductive or beautiful as I had ever imagined—meh. But I am interested in myth and how it informs our understanding. I’m even more concerned with its affect on perception. The article exclaims, “To tell stories is as natural to us as breathing.” To a large extent, our personal histories are formed by the stories our parents tell us about ourselves growing up and even their lives, but what’s odd in my case, is that my parents rarely fit this description. They didn’t tell stories or even read stories, but I do know that we all tell stories in our mind daily, and it’s these stories, the stories I tell myself, that I’m most interested in. What are the myths I have built in my own life?
Ed Check
My Working-Class Roots in an Academic War Zone: Creating Space to Grieve and Honor
Having working-class roots myself, I was instantly interested in reading this article. The author made arguments about how issues of working-class, gay identity, and grievance and loss, are left of our curriculums. He also shared his experiences as an academic, and personal stories about his life. I found it to be interesting, in that some of it I could relate to—the constant derogatory African-American jokes, for example. What it lacks, is some tools for application in the classroom. What I like about the myth article, in comparison, is the exercises included, which can be incorporated into art lessons. I do, however, like the idea of honoring working-class people. Many of these people work very long hours and have very difficult jobs, and though they may not have the best grammar, they are the backbone of this country. What educators do, on the country, is teach kids to aspire to something more, in a sense devaluing their current working-class experience.
Wendy Ewald
I Wanna Take Me a Picture
What’s shocking is that I’ve known about Wendy Ewald and her work with children for quite a long time, but I have not ever investigated what she does. I’m a little disappointed to have waited so long to learn about her. Her work with children is great. Kids are generally uncomfortable with sharing personal stories with classmates out of fear of ridicule, let alone an entire school or community, but I think her approach makes them feel comfortable. I plan to read much more about her work with children and have now shared her with other photography teachers in my district.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Craig's Friday Presentation
Harry’s Time
The nurse enters the room. “Are you awake? Harry, wake up.”
Harry woke up from his anesthetic haze.
“MY FUCKING CHEST HURTS MORE THAN BEFORE and I have to take a piss.”
He had to lay flat. Doctor’s orders. The nurse hands him a plastic piss jug and says she will be right back.
Harry positions the jug between his legs and tries to relax. A little piss drips onto the sheet.
Harry responds, “I hope they change these sheets soon.”
The nurse returns after a while with a hypo filled with relief. She injects the clear fluid into the IV port in his sore hand. A calm floods Harry after a couple moments. Morphine he thinks. It reminds him of the times he stuck needles into his own arm. That was another time.
Harry rubs his face, then reaches for a small mirror on the cart beside his bed. There are now some lines he can trace along his face. Traces of time.
Ooh, time. Time past, still time, our time, future time. Harry wondered if times were getting better or getting worse. He always had a difficult time putting his finger on the present.
Harry speculated whether time was long as in a line or wide like the plain his grandmother is buried in. In this immobilized body he now can move across the dim line.
Harry relaxes and contends, “Ah, this long thin line, and if I should loose my balance I will fall and crush to death all my lovers.”
Harry mused about the idea of punctuation for that sentence. “Actually, periods are not that useful. Thoughts don’t end, they collide like streams flowing into a river. There should be tiny stop watches at the end of sentences that tell you how long it took to write that that one thought. After all, sentences are keeping track of my time.”
Lately, Harry was wondering who he is. At least at this time. His assorted lives slipping by in an endless stream. Harry didn’t mind the shifting changes of life. He was fluid. He could move with the ebbing and flowing of the environments he found himself in. He wondered who made all this shit, but he didn’t like thinking of God. God left him long ago. If he had to think of God he would like to stare into His angry face and tell Him how to run this sideshow.
As the morphine kept time with the rhythm of his heartbeat Harry nodded off to sleep thinking about Aegean blue and lounging on a rooftop in Santorini, reading Beckett, sipping wine and smoking opium with his constant friend and sometimes lover Carrie. He used to call her Lola.
Harry woke to an unenthused phlebotomist fumbling a needle for blood.
“Fucking rude vampires,” he grumbles under his breath.
He grabbed a small notebook next to his bed and scribbled illegibly across the page, “What happens when the world you live in doesn’t work the way you want to live?”
Harry mutters, “That cunt couldn’t even come to the hospital to see me. She said this was the last time–she couldn’t handle anymore. Some fucking compassion.”
“The bitch is taking my time, my money, my house and my name.”
A scar now covers the tattoo that contained her name on his left breast.
His wife is gone, but he still has time with his kids.
Harry didn’t mind the discord in his life, but a divorce could have been done with a little more finesse. He liked the in-between spaces with a sense of unknowing. He wasn’t sure if he would be lonely or happy in time. He looked into future time like pulling focus of a video camera. Something could materialize, moving in and out of focus, distance, perspective and point of view, but then vanish just the same. The movement through the years, days and moments of his life all diverging in an irreconcilable way.
Harry heard the sound of a car stereo echoing through the hospital window. He thought about the times he became excessively annoyed when listening to music in his car only to have another car pull up bumping some shit out of subwoofers. He always hated that fucking rap. Over time, Harry began enjoying the discord of the combination of two dissimilar genres. The hip hop beat blended well with the Velvet’s “Sister Ray” or John Zorn’s sax. He like the uniqueness, connections, overlaps and chance compositions never to be experienced again.
Now these seemingly disparate rhythms became anthems for his time.
Harry cringes and utters, “This Goddamn pain won’t let up.”
He wondered if the nurse would be stingy with the morphine. He pressed the call button.
She promptly delivered some relief with just a little taste of morphine. Enough to get his ragged body by.
Harry’s body has been letting him down. Turning him inside out. He guessed that it was just the ravages of time on a still living body. It is just change. Inevitable. Change. This architectural framework called a body is weathering. Bad heart, bad cholesterol, headaches, protruding stomach, sagging breasts, a shriveled cock. This change Harry had to carry in his heart. Harry thought about what that sullen faced philosopher Heraclitus purported, “There is nothing permanent except change.”
Harry was in need of a change. There was that Russian woman in New York he had talked to several times. She had liked the paintings he had done. Harry had time for new creations. Although, he would have to at least wait until he could stand up to pee.
He nodded off again listening to the repetitious rhythms of the heart monitor.
Harry woke to the sound of a group of chatty doctors entering the room.
One doctor asks Harry if he still has any pain.
Harry nods his head.
The doctor remarks, “We had to do plenty of cutting and stretching. That is where the pain is from”
Another doctor announces that they are concerned that his enzyme levels had risen and they need to keep him for observation a couple more nights.
Harry thinks, “More time. Fuck, they gave me a heart attack on top of this. That is another reason why the pain is killing me.”
A third doctor says that Harry already had too much morphine and they cannot give him more.
The first doctor replies, “We’ll get you fixed up.” Then they exit the room.
Frustrated, Harry resigned to wasting his time in the hospital bed.
Harry picks up Bukowski’s book “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” and begins reading in the middle of the book.
The nurse came in with two syringes. She flushed the IV with one and said the other contained dilaudid, which the doctor had reluctantly prescribed.
Harry thought, “Fucking crap, need 10 grains to kill a headache with that shit.”
It was just enough of the drug to make Harry’s eyes lidded and change his tension to relaxation. His body slipped away into a dreamless sleep.
It was Harry’s time.
The nurse enters the room. “Are you awake? Harry, wake up.”
Harry woke up from his anesthetic haze.
“MY FUCKING CHEST HURTS MORE THAN BEFORE and I have to take a piss.”
He had to lay flat. Doctor’s orders. The nurse hands him a plastic piss jug and says she will be right back.
Harry positions the jug between his legs and tries to relax. A little piss drips onto the sheet.
Harry responds, “I hope they change these sheets soon.”
The nurse returns after a while with a hypo filled with relief. She injects the clear fluid into the IV port in his sore hand. A calm floods Harry after a couple moments. Morphine he thinks. It reminds him of the times he stuck needles into his own arm. That was another time.
Harry rubs his face, then reaches for a small mirror on the cart beside his bed. There are now some lines he can trace along his face. Traces of time.
Ooh, time. Time past, still time, our time, future time. Harry wondered if times were getting better or getting worse. He always had a difficult time putting his finger on the present.
Harry speculated whether time was long as in a line or wide like the plain his grandmother is buried in. In this immobilized body he now can move across the dim line.
Harry relaxes and contends, “Ah, this long thin line, and if I should loose my balance I will fall and crush to death all my lovers.”
Harry mused about the idea of punctuation for that sentence. “Actually, periods are not that useful. Thoughts don’t end, they collide like streams flowing into a river. There should be tiny stop watches at the end of sentences that tell you how long it took to write that that one thought. After all, sentences are keeping track of my time.”
Lately, Harry was wondering who he is. At least at this time. His assorted lives slipping by in an endless stream. Harry didn’t mind the shifting changes of life. He was fluid. He could move with the ebbing and flowing of the environments he found himself in. He wondered who made all this shit, but he didn’t like thinking of God. God left him long ago. If he had to think of God he would like to stare into His angry face and tell Him how to run this sideshow.
As the morphine kept time with the rhythm of his heartbeat Harry nodded off to sleep thinking about Aegean blue and lounging on a rooftop in Santorini, reading Beckett, sipping wine and smoking opium with his constant friend and sometimes lover Carrie. He used to call her Lola.
Harry woke to an unenthused phlebotomist fumbling a needle for blood.
“Fucking rude vampires,” he grumbles under his breath.
He grabbed a small notebook next to his bed and scribbled illegibly across the page, “What happens when the world you live in doesn’t work the way you want to live?”
Harry mutters, “That cunt couldn’t even come to the hospital to see me. She said this was the last time–she couldn’t handle anymore. Some fucking compassion.”
“The bitch is taking my time, my money, my house and my name.”
A scar now covers the tattoo that contained her name on his left breast.
His wife is gone, but he still has time with his kids.
Harry didn’t mind the discord in his life, but a divorce could have been done with a little more finesse. He liked the in-between spaces with a sense of unknowing. He wasn’t sure if he would be lonely or happy in time. He looked into future time like pulling focus of a video camera. Something could materialize, moving in and out of focus, distance, perspective and point of view, but then vanish just the same. The movement through the years, days and moments of his life all diverging in an irreconcilable way.
Harry heard the sound of a car stereo echoing through the hospital window. He thought about the times he became excessively annoyed when listening to music in his car only to have another car pull up bumping some shit out of subwoofers. He always hated that fucking rap. Over time, Harry began enjoying the discord of the combination of two dissimilar genres. The hip hop beat blended well with the Velvet’s “Sister Ray” or John Zorn’s sax. He like the uniqueness, connections, overlaps and chance compositions never to be experienced again.
Now these seemingly disparate rhythms became anthems for his time.
Harry cringes and utters, “This Goddamn pain won’t let up.”
He wondered if the nurse would be stingy with the morphine. He pressed the call button.
She promptly delivered some relief with just a little taste of morphine. Enough to get his ragged body by.
Harry’s body has been letting him down. Turning him inside out. He guessed that it was just the ravages of time on a still living body. It is just change. Inevitable. Change. This architectural framework called a body is weathering. Bad heart, bad cholesterol, headaches, protruding stomach, sagging breasts, a shriveled cock. This change Harry had to carry in his heart. Harry thought about what that sullen faced philosopher Heraclitus purported, “There is nothing permanent except change.”
Harry was in need of a change. There was that Russian woman in New York he had talked to several times. She had liked the paintings he had done. Harry had time for new creations. Although, he would have to at least wait until he could stand up to pee.
He nodded off again listening to the repetitious rhythms of the heart monitor.
Harry woke to the sound of a group of chatty doctors entering the room.
One doctor asks Harry if he still has any pain.
Harry nods his head.
The doctor remarks, “We had to do plenty of cutting and stretching. That is where the pain is from”
Another doctor announces that they are concerned that his enzyme levels had risen and they need to keep him for observation a couple more nights.
Harry thinks, “More time. Fuck, they gave me a heart attack on top of this. That is another reason why the pain is killing me.”
A third doctor says that Harry already had too much morphine and they cannot give him more.
The first doctor replies, “We’ll get you fixed up.” Then they exit the room.
Frustrated, Harry resigned to wasting his time in the hospital bed.
Harry picks up Bukowski’s book “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” and begins reading in the middle of the book.
The nurse came in with two syringes. She flushed the IV with one and said the other contained dilaudid, which the doctor had reluctantly prescribed.
Harry thought, “Fucking crap, need 10 grains to kill a headache with that shit.”
It was just enough of the drug to make Harry’s eyes lidded and change his tension to relaxation. His body slipped away into a dreamless sleep.
It was Harry’s time.
Craig's Response to Wexner
The Apartment in the City
After Mark Bradford’s
Black Venus
I was abruptly dismissed from Alex’s small and dingy apartment. The apartment and I were high and had a view of the Jersey docks. The filthy river separated us in numerous ways. I knew it couldn’t last.
I was injected into the salacious city streets that were shrieking and screaming the secrets of a thousand kinetic lives. I was looking to make a quick buck to satiate my hunger and calm my nausea. Although, nobody was cruising for me.
I turned down Houston. This city was built with hundreds of juxtaposing grids, like Rome in a massive layer of darkness. Tunnels of memories and bones colliding into the Pope’s white castle.
I wandered sidewalks of missing pavements searching for Lou who I didn’t realize was sitting in the Tombs. Hot air rushed up from the underground through the grates as I surveyed the streets. The subway trains are cancer spreading in the veins of the city. I took the C uptown.
I saw Ricky near St. Luke’s aiming to score. He looked cloaked in sickness. I ignored him and continued moving through the city exploring decayed, hidden dwellings long forgotten of their purpose.
Their was a little blacken building on the corner of some dirty alley on a street that lost its sign. It had a falling facade, and cracked, filthy windows. No lights, no sign of life in this empty edifice. I had talked to Chico about it before when we bought beer at the bodega around the corner. He had the same ideas about hollow buildings. The crazy old man who hung around the neighborhood warned it was occupied by the devil. He said he saw him taking out trash bags at night. The old man had a grave look on his face when he told me, as if he really saw the Prince of Darkness.
I broke into the black palace that night using a rusted hammer to break a decayed padlock. It had a tall, narrow stairway in the back that led to the upper floor. There were eight small rooms. They were probably sleazy offices of some sort at one time. Dingy silver spray paint betrayed the rantings of teenagers gone by. I gazed out the dusty window at the gloomy street below. It was a hot night. I decided to stay.
The next day Chico and I stoled some long deceased furniture from an abandoned queer bar down the street. He said he knew of a mattress the hustlers use near the river that he could cop for me. It was my new home among dark leftovers lost amid the hundreds of choked grids and ancient garbage of my city. This city is on my side like a geometric tattoo.
After Mark Bradford’s
Black Venus
I was abruptly dismissed from Alex’s small and dingy apartment. The apartment and I were high and had a view of the Jersey docks. The filthy river separated us in numerous ways. I knew it couldn’t last.
I was injected into the salacious city streets that were shrieking and screaming the secrets of a thousand kinetic lives. I was looking to make a quick buck to satiate my hunger and calm my nausea. Although, nobody was cruising for me.
I turned down Houston. This city was built with hundreds of juxtaposing grids, like Rome in a massive layer of darkness. Tunnels of memories and bones colliding into the Pope’s white castle.
I wandered sidewalks of missing pavements searching for Lou who I didn’t realize was sitting in the Tombs. Hot air rushed up from the underground through the grates as I surveyed the streets. The subway trains are cancer spreading in the veins of the city. I took the C uptown.
I saw Ricky near St. Luke’s aiming to score. He looked cloaked in sickness. I ignored him and continued moving through the city exploring decayed, hidden dwellings long forgotten of their purpose.
Their was a little blacken building on the corner of some dirty alley on a street that lost its sign. It had a falling facade, and cracked, filthy windows. No lights, no sign of life in this empty edifice. I had talked to Chico about it before when we bought beer at the bodega around the corner. He had the same ideas about hollow buildings. The crazy old man who hung around the neighborhood warned it was occupied by the devil. He said he saw him taking out trash bags at night. The old man had a grave look on his face when he told me, as if he really saw the Prince of Darkness.
I broke into the black palace that night using a rusted hammer to break a decayed padlock. It had a tall, narrow stairway in the back that led to the upper floor. There were eight small rooms. They were probably sleazy offices of some sort at one time. Dingy silver spray paint betrayed the rantings of teenagers gone by. I gazed out the dusty window at the gloomy street below. It was a hot night. I decided to stay.
The next day Chico and I stoled some long deceased furniture from an abandoned queer bar down the street. He said he knew of a mattress the hustlers use near the river that he could cop for me. It was my new home among dark leftovers lost amid the hundreds of choked grids and ancient garbage of my city. This city is on my side like a geometric tattoo.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Liz's Bio
“ Mom, tell me a story about when you were little”
Driving at night through falling snow is magical. The outside world is dark and black save the tiny white specks illuminated by headlights. As a child, I loved riding in the car at night, especially during a snowfall. The heat hushed from the vents and blew warm air on my face, inducing a calm drowsiness as our old blue GMC van hurtled through a galaxy of stars which blazed past the windshield and melted on the side on the van. My mother, in a wooly purple hat and mismatched gloves, sat at the wheel listening to NPR until my brother and I would begin the familiar chant, ‘mom tell us a story about when you were little.’
Hearing stories about my mother’s past was an integral part of my childhood. Although she mostly shared these during bedtime, they often made appearances on car trips. My earliest memory of her sharing a piece of her history is actually during such a car ride, though I know it was not the first time. My father was driving so my mother twisted around in the passenger seat, trying to see us in the dark. My brother and I were crammed in the back. Our heads nestled in seatbelt slings that stretched from above our shoulders down across our laps. This time she told us about a trip to Ireland. She was eight and my aunt was six. They visited Blarney castle, kissed the famous stone, and on the way home two boys dumped coffee grounds in their hair. Such were the tales that made my bedtime stories. Her accounts were descriptive and she would recall architectural details and sometimes even the clothes she wore. You might think a child would tire of hearing about their parent’s past, but my mother had wonderful stories to tell.
My grandfather worked for the Dow Chemical Company and was transferred in the 1960s from Michigan to Switzerland. Thus my mother spent the majority of elementary school in Zurich and most of high school in the Netherlands. She had fabulous stories about ranging from when her family first sailed to Europe by boat to the moment she realized she could fluently understand Swiss. Skiing in the Alps, visiting castles, moped riding boyfriends, Holland in the 1960s, hitchhiking around Greece, and the list continued. There was travel, romance, adventure, drama, and danger but most importantly it was all true and it all happened to my mom.
Perhaps this was especially fascinating since my mother did not appear to be the adventurous globe trotting sort. She was a registered dietician living in rural NJ. She was overworked, underpaid, had few friends, and rarely socialized let alone travel. I used to tell her stories to my friends at school who were equally enthralled by her international escapades. In my 8th grade year book I listed travel as my favorite activity despite the fact that I had never left the country and only traveled to visit relatives. I constantly compared my life to my mother’s. Not with a desire to relive her experiences or see if my own experiences measured up, but in terms of what stories I had accumulated thus far in my life. What adventures had I added that year?
I can not remember the first time my mother told me a story about her past. I don’t recall how old I was, which story she chose to recount, or where we were at the time. She has told me that when my brother and I were babies and crying, unable to be comforted she would sit with us in her green rocking chair, close her eyes and remember the adventures she had before I was born, before she ever met my father.
My understanding and interactions with these narratives has changed as I have gotten older. Although they certainly served as a form of entertainment for my brother and me, I now see that for my mother they were also a form of escape. Escape from an abusive marriage and oppressive home life and a return to her family whom she had been separated from due to my father’s job, a return to a life that seemed just as unreal to her as it did to me and my brother.
Yet, while for my mother the stories represented a time and person lost and distant, to me they were a promise of things to come. I would escape and have my own adventures and stories to tell. Stories I could call upon someday if someone asked me to tell me as story about when I was little.
Driving at night through falling snow is magical. The outside world is dark and black save the tiny white specks illuminated by headlights. As a child, I loved riding in the car at night, especially during a snowfall. The heat hushed from the vents and blew warm air on my face, inducing a calm drowsiness as our old blue GMC van hurtled through a galaxy of stars which blazed past the windshield and melted on the side on the van. My mother, in a wooly purple hat and mismatched gloves, sat at the wheel listening to NPR until my brother and I would begin the familiar chant, ‘mom tell us a story about when you were little.’
Hearing stories about my mother’s past was an integral part of my childhood. Although she mostly shared these during bedtime, they often made appearances on car trips. My earliest memory of her sharing a piece of her history is actually during such a car ride, though I know it was not the first time. My father was driving so my mother twisted around in the passenger seat, trying to see us in the dark. My brother and I were crammed in the back. Our heads nestled in seatbelt slings that stretched from above our shoulders down across our laps. This time she told us about a trip to Ireland. She was eight and my aunt was six. They visited Blarney castle, kissed the famous stone, and on the way home two boys dumped coffee grounds in their hair. Such were the tales that made my bedtime stories. Her accounts were descriptive and she would recall architectural details and sometimes even the clothes she wore. You might think a child would tire of hearing about their parent’s past, but my mother had wonderful stories to tell.
My grandfather worked for the Dow Chemical Company and was transferred in the 1960s from Michigan to Switzerland. Thus my mother spent the majority of elementary school in Zurich and most of high school in the Netherlands. She had fabulous stories about ranging from when her family first sailed to Europe by boat to the moment she realized she could fluently understand Swiss. Skiing in the Alps, visiting castles, moped riding boyfriends, Holland in the 1960s, hitchhiking around Greece, and the list continued. There was travel, romance, adventure, drama, and danger but most importantly it was all true and it all happened to my mom.
Perhaps this was especially fascinating since my mother did not appear to be the adventurous globe trotting sort. She was a registered dietician living in rural NJ. She was overworked, underpaid, had few friends, and rarely socialized let alone travel. I used to tell her stories to my friends at school who were equally enthralled by her international escapades. In my 8th grade year book I listed travel as my favorite activity despite the fact that I had never left the country and only traveled to visit relatives. I constantly compared my life to my mother’s. Not with a desire to relive her experiences or see if my own experiences measured up, but in terms of what stories I had accumulated thus far in my life. What adventures had I added that year?
I can not remember the first time my mother told me a story about her past. I don’t recall how old I was, which story she chose to recount, or where we were at the time. She has told me that when my brother and I were babies and crying, unable to be comforted she would sit with us in her green rocking chair, close her eyes and remember the adventures she had before I was born, before she ever met my father.
My understanding and interactions with these narratives has changed as I have gotten older. Although they certainly served as a form of entertainment for my brother and me, I now see that for my mother they were also a form of escape. Escape from an abusive marriage and oppressive home life and a return to her family whom she had been separated from due to my father’s job, a return to a life that seemed just as unreal to her as it did to me and my brother.
Yet, while for my mother the stories represented a time and person lost and distant, to me they were a promise of things to come. I would escape and have my own adventures and stories to tell. Stories I could call upon someday if someone asked me to tell me as story about when I was little.
Liz's 100 Word Bio
I am the first of two. We lived on a farm that was not ours. I loved to dress up, draw, and write books.
For a time, I lived on the stage. My life was school, friends, and Matt. Home was bad. Next I was the
small fish, shy. I made art all the time. Taught for the red white and blue. My heart bled for two years.
Chased love over the sea but the ghosts came too. Last May marked ten years with Matt but that is
done now. A plane ride to a new home, here I am.
For a time, I lived on the stage. My life was school, friends, and Matt. Home was bad. Next I was the
small fish, shy. I made art all the time. Taught for the red white and blue. My heart bled for two years.
Chased love over the sea but the ghosts came too. Last May marked ten years with Matt but that is
done now. A plane ride to a new home, here I am.
Liz's Friday Presentation
A Lost Tooth
Dominique’s mouth was open her head angled back to better reveal the black hole where, minutes before, the tooth had nestled securely in a pocket of pink gum. Blood mixed with saliva and stained the surrounding teeth and lower lip a deep red. She sobbed in long extended wheezes keeping her eyes squeezed shut, cheeks wet with tears, “Ms. Kengeter [sob sob] Rashaad knocked my tooth out.”
A small group of children stood behind Dominique. A few of them had witnessed the crime and shouted out various verdicts. It was just an accident! It was Rashaad’s fault! Dominique started it! The rest of those gathered had been attracted by Dominique’s noisy sobs, drawn to drama of any sort like buzzards to a carcass.
Stay calm stay calm stay calm I thought.
I was in my first year as a first grade teacher at South Warren Elementary school. It was recess, that sacred twenty minute block of freedom that brings temporary relief from the oppression of pencils and hand-raising. When I was a student, my elementary school used a system of colored flags to indicate where recess would be held that day. A red flag meant it was too cold or wet to be outside and recess would be held indoors. A white flag signaled that the grass was too damp or there was snow on the ground and outdoor play was confined to the blacktop. A green flag meant we had access to the grass and therefore could use the playground or sport fields.
This type of organizational system did not exist at South Warren. Teachers just looked outside their windows. If it was raining the class stayed in; if it wasn’t, the class went out. Today was sunny and so the class was outside. Usually two classes were scheduled to use the playground at a time in order to avoid over crowding. However, the other first grade teacher didn’t like our time block, and since no one in the administration really cared what the teachers did, she took them outside at her leisure. Thus, every day my class had the playground to themselves.
It was a relatively new playground, purchased and installed after years of fundraising by the parents. This was a considerable achievement as 95% of students qualified for free or reduced lunch and many of the families didn’t even own a car. Although we had the lowest test scores in the county, the smallest student body, and outdated facilities, our playground was beautiful.
The school sat near the edge of the woods. A dirt driveway formed a U-shape in front of the building and connected it to a small paved road. There wasn’t a soccer field or a tee-ball diamond since South Warren did not have any sports teams. There was a nice lawn behind the school but my first graders preferred to stay within the boundaries of the wood chipped playground.
Play time had commenced as usual. Students broke off into small groups some ran straight to the playground equipment, while others began their latest favorite game, cops. From what I could gather this was kind of like tag but with multiple chasers. When you were caught you were pushed up against playground equipment and frisked. The innocent were let free and the guilty hauled off to jail, only to escape later.
Dominique had run over with her mouth open and eyes shut. I wondered how she could see and was concerned she would run into the playground equipment, it had happened before. Now she stood before me with her mouth open and bloody. “Miss Kengeter,” she wheezed again, “Rashaad knocked my tooth out.” She pulled back her upper lip and sure enough there was a gaping hole.
Ok, I thought. Stay calm. “Dominique, where is the tooth?”
“I don’t know,” she cried.
Rashaad poked his head through the gathering crowd of onlookers. “It was an accident Ms. Kengeter,” he said in his small slow voice. “We were just playing.”
I would figure that out later. “Dominique, was your tooth already loose?”
“No,” she cried.
Okay, I was getting nervous. “Dominique. This is important, was it a big tooth or a baby tooth?”
“It was a big one,” she cried.
Oh shit. My attempt to remain calm vaporized, lunch turned to lead in my stomach, and full on panic set in. Mouth injuries, particularly those involving teeth make me incredibly squeamish. I had pulled very few of my own baby teeth. Apparently, the size of my adult teeth were considerably larger than the space I had in my mouth so whenever an incoming tooth showed up on an X-ray at the dentist, they put on the “snoopy nose”, a small black cup that fit loosely over my nose and administered nitrous oxide. In my hazy dream-like state I watched the dentist through the reflection of his glasses up until the moment of tooth removal. But even though I shut my eyes, I can still remember the crack of my own teeth as they were uprooted. Later, when it was time to go home, a nurse would hand me a small plastic treasure chest. Inside would be between one and four baby teeth resting on a small cotton ball pillow.
Since then my worst nightmares have involved my teeth becoming loose and falling out. In the dreams I try to stuff them back in their notches but they won’t stay. Once I heard a report on NPR about methamphetamine addicts. One of the side effects is that your teeth become soft like the consistency of cantaloupe. I had to turn the radio off.
If Dominique had lost an adult tooth we had to find it immediately. My nightmares about tooth loss had actually prompted me to ask my dentist what to do if I ever lost a tooth, so I knew once we found it we first needed to clean it then try and stick it back up in the gum. If it wouldn’t fit we needed to get it into a glass of milk. But first we needed the tooth.
Unfortunately, South Warren only had a nurse in the building on Friday afternoons, and it was not a Friday. I grabbed the kid closest to me.
“Laquan, run inside and get Ms. Munn. Tell her Ms. Kengeter has an emergency on the playground.” He started to walk back to the building.
“Run Laquan” I yelled and turned back to the students.
“EVERYBODY STOP!!” I must have really sounded panicked because everybody actually stopped. “This is an emergency, come over here immediately.” I am sure they sensed that my anxiety was escalating exponentially because they froze and quickly gathered around me.
“Dominique has lost her tooth. We have to find it and we have to find it fast! It is somewhere in the woodchips. It is probably lying on top so we need to be careful that we don’t dig around or kick the chips. “
“Will we get a prize?” someone asked.
“Definitely,” I said, desperate for any kind of incentive that might lead one of the six year olds to find the tooth.
That got everyone excited, including Dominique whose crying lessened and started the hunt with her classmates for her own tooth.
“What does it look like?” someone shouted.
“It’s a tooth guys, it looks like a tooth.”
“What color is it?”
Oh my god, seriously? “It’s a tooth! It is white.”
I turned to see three boys, legs spread and bent over digging ferociously in the woodchips like dogs, bits of wood flying through their legs and hitting the other kids.
“Hey!” I shouted. “I said no digging! Just look at the surface of the ground.”
Where was Laquan? All he needed to do was walk to the first classroom in the building.
I looked back at the school and there he was, meandering across the grass and looking at something on his arm. I ran over to him. “Where is Ms Munn I asked?”
“Well,” said Laquan slowly, “I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do.”
Breathe Liz. Breathe.
“Ashe,” I shouted out to one of the more reliable students. “Go inside and get the first teacher you see. Tell them Ms. Kengeter has an emergency. Run!”
He dutifully took off and was back two minutes later with Ms. Munn. They strolled over to the playground where kids and I were on our hands and knees sifting through the woodchips.
On the verge of hysterics, I explained the situation and she called Dominique over. She took one look and said, “Oh that’s just a baby tooth Ms. Kengeter. Nothing to worry about. See how there aren’t any holes for the roots? She’s fine.”
Oh.
The children went back to playing.
In one sentence she had pushed back the waves of stress and guilt about to crush me. But surprisingly this release was followed by an intense flood of emotion. First I thought I might start laughing at the utter chaos that had just occurred. Then I felt annoyed that Dominique told me it was a big tooth. I was frustrated with Ms. Munn for casually dismissing my anxiety and Dominique’s injury. I felt foolish for not knowing that it had been a baby tooth and embarrassed for my emotional state in front of another teacher. I was angry at the school for only having a nurse one day a week who would have been able to handle this situation despite the age of the tooth. I was even angrier at the district and a larger educational system that allowed a school to exist where a person like me, with virtually no teacher training, could be an asset and responsible for the lives and education of sixteen beautiful children.
When my emotional roller coaster ended I was tired. And by the time the class lined up to walk back inside I just felt sad. Sad because we never found the tooth and sad I couldn’t present Dominique with that little piece of her childhood, safely nestled on clean white cotton in a plastic treasure chest.
Dominique’s mouth was open her head angled back to better reveal the black hole where, minutes before, the tooth had nestled securely in a pocket of pink gum. Blood mixed with saliva and stained the surrounding teeth and lower lip a deep red. She sobbed in long extended wheezes keeping her eyes squeezed shut, cheeks wet with tears, “Ms. Kengeter [sob sob] Rashaad knocked my tooth out.”
A small group of children stood behind Dominique. A few of them had witnessed the crime and shouted out various verdicts. It was just an accident! It was Rashaad’s fault! Dominique started it! The rest of those gathered had been attracted by Dominique’s noisy sobs, drawn to drama of any sort like buzzards to a carcass.
Stay calm stay calm stay calm I thought.
I was in my first year as a first grade teacher at South Warren Elementary school. It was recess, that sacred twenty minute block of freedom that brings temporary relief from the oppression of pencils and hand-raising. When I was a student, my elementary school used a system of colored flags to indicate where recess would be held that day. A red flag meant it was too cold or wet to be outside and recess would be held indoors. A white flag signaled that the grass was too damp or there was snow on the ground and outdoor play was confined to the blacktop. A green flag meant we had access to the grass and therefore could use the playground or sport fields.
This type of organizational system did not exist at South Warren. Teachers just looked outside their windows. If it was raining the class stayed in; if it wasn’t, the class went out. Today was sunny and so the class was outside. Usually two classes were scheduled to use the playground at a time in order to avoid over crowding. However, the other first grade teacher didn’t like our time block, and since no one in the administration really cared what the teachers did, she took them outside at her leisure. Thus, every day my class had the playground to themselves.
It was a relatively new playground, purchased and installed after years of fundraising by the parents. This was a considerable achievement as 95% of students qualified for free or reduced lunch and many of the families didn’t even own a car. Although we had the lowest test scores in the county, the smallest student body, and outdated facilities, our playground was beautiful.
The school sat near the edge of the woods. A dirt driveway formed a U-shape in front of the building and connected it to a small paved road. There wasn’t a soccer field or a tee-ball diamond since South Warren did not have any sports teams. There was a nice lawn behind the school but my first graders preferred to stay within the boundaries of the wood chipped playground.
Play time had commenced as usual. Students broke off into small groups some ran straight to the playground equipment, while others began their latest favorite game, cops. From what I could gather this was kind of like tag but with multiple chasers. When you were caught you were pushed up against playground equipment and frisked. The innocent were let free and the guilty hauled off to jail, only to escape later.
Dominique had run over with her mouth open and eyes shut. I wondered how she could see and was concerned she would run into the playground equipment, it had happened before. Now she stood before me with her mouth open and bloody. “Miss Kengeter,” she wheezed again, “Rashaad knocked my tooth out.” She pulled back her upper lip and sure enough there was a gaping hole.
Ok, I thought. Stay calm. “Dominique, where is the tooth?”
“I don’t know,” she cried.
Rashaad poked his head through the gathering crowd of onlookers. “It was an accident Ms. Kengeter,” he said in his small slow voice. “We were just playing.”
I would figure that out later. “Dominique, was your tooth already loose?”
“No,” she cried.
Okay, I was getting nervous. “Dominique. This is important, was it a big tooth or a baby tooth?”
“It was a big one,” she cried.
Oh shit. My attempt to remain calm vaporized, lunch turned to lead in my stomach, and full on panic set in. Mouth injuries, particularly those involving teeth make me incredibly squeamish. I had pulled very few of my own baby teeth. Apparently, the size of my adult teeth were considerably larger than the space I had in my mouth so whenever an incoming tooth showed up on an X-ray at the dentist, they put on the “snoopy nose”, a small black cup that fit loosely over my nose and administered nitrous oxide. In my hazy dream-like state I watched the dentist through the reflection of his glasses up until the moment of tooth removal. But even though I shut my eyes, I can still remember the crack of my own teeth as they were uprooted. Later, when it was time to go home, a nurse would hand me a small plastic treasure chest. Inside would be between one and four baby teeth resting on a small cotton ball pillow.
Since then my worst nightmares have involved my teeth becoming loose and falling out. In the dreams I try to stuff them back in their notches but they won’t stay. Once I heard a report on NPR about methamphetamine addicts. One of the side effects is that your teeth become soft like the consistency of cantaloupe. I had to turn the radio off.
If Dominique had lost an adult tooth we had to find it immediately. My nightmares about tooth loss had actually prompted me to ask my dentist what to do if I ever lost a tooth, so I knew once we found it we first needed to clean it then try and stick it back up in the gum. If it wouldn’t fit we needed to get it into a glass of milk. But first we needed the tooth.
Unfortunately, South Warren only had a nurse in the building on Friday afternoons, and it was not a Friday. I grabbed the kid closest to me.
“Laquan, run inside and get Ms. Munn. Tell her Ms. Kengeter has an emergency on the playground.” He started to walk back to the building.
“Run Laquan” I yelled and turned back to the students.
“EVERYBODY STOP!!” I must have really sounded panicked because everybody actually stopped. “This is an emergency, come over here immediately.” I am sure they sensed that my anxiety was escalating exponentially because they froze and quickly gathered around me.
“Dominique has lost her tooth. We have to find it and we have to find it fast! It is somewhere in the woodchips. It is probably lying on top so we need to be careful that we don’t dig around or kick the chips. “
“Will we get a prize?” someone asked.
“Definitely,” I said, desperate for any kind of incentive that might lead one of the six year olds to find the tooth.
That got everyone excited, including Dominique whose crying lessened and started the hunt with her classmates for her own tooth.
“What does it look like?” someone shouted.
“It’s a tooth guys, it looks like a tooth.”
“What color is it?”
Oh my god, seriously? “It’s a tooth! It is white.”
I turned to see three boys, legs spread and bent over digging ferociously in the woodchips like dogs, bits of wood flying through their legs and hitting the other kids.
“Hey!” I shouted. “I said no digging! Just look at the surface of the ground.”
Where was Laquan? All he needed to do was walk to the first classroom in the building.
I looked back at the school and there he was, meandering across the grass and looking at something on his arm. I ran over to him. “Where is Ms Munn I asked?”
“Well,” said Laquan slowly, “I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do.”
Breathe Liz. Breathe.
“Ashe,” I shouted out to one of the more reliable students. “Go inside and get the first teacher you see. Tell them Ms. Kengeter has an emergency. Run!”
He dutifully took off and was back two minutes later with Ms. Munn. They strolled over to the playground where kids and I were on our hands and knees sifting through the woodchips.
On the verge of hysterics, I explained the situation and she called Dominique over. She took one look and said, “Oh that’s just a baby tooth Ms. Kengeter. Nothing to worry about. See how there aren’t any holes for the roots? She’s fine.”
Oh.
The children went back to playing.
In one sentence she had pushed back the waves of stress and guilt about to crush me. But surprisingly this release was followed by an intense flood of emotion. First I thought I might start laughing at the utter chaos that had just occurred. Then I felt annoyed that Dominique told me it was a big tooth. I was frustrated with Ms. Munn for casually dismissing my anxiety and Dominique’s injury. I felt foolish for not knowing that it had been a baby tooth and embarrassed for my emotional state in front of another teacher. I was angry at the school for only having a nurse one day a week who would have been able to handle this situation despite the age of the tooth. I was even angrier at the district and a larger educational system that allowed a school to exist where a person like me, with virtually no teacher training, could be an asset and responsible for the lives and education of sixteen beautiful children.
When my emotional roller coaster ended I was tired. And by the time the class lined up to walk back inside I just felt sad. Sad because we never found the tooth and sad I couldn’t present Dominique with that little piece of her childhood, safely nestled on clean white cotton in a plastic treasure chest.
Liz's Final
Misunderstandings
1
Our sound of the week was ā, the long a sound spelled ai and ay and four first graders sat around the curve of a large kidney table waiting for me to give them the next word.
“May,” I said and was quickly answered with, “Say.” “Tray.” “Lay.” “Play.” As each child contributed their rhyme I drew a small clean line below their name, keeping track of their correct responses with nice neat picket fences. There would not be a winner or a loser in our game but the fact that they earned “points” always got students excited.
“How about sail?”
“Mail.” “Jail.” “Whale.” “Spail.” The last answer came from Paige. She was a sweet girl with blonde hair that reached her waist and round cheeks like a cabbage patch doll. I drew tallies for the first three answers and looked at Paige.
“Can you tell me your word one more time?”
“Spay-il” she repeated, slower this time.
“Hmmm. Spail is not a word but it certainly rhymes with sail. Good job.” And I drew a fresh line under her name.
“ No. It’s a word” Paige continued with confidence. “You know, like my spailing words.”
Vowel sounds proved to be a tricky thing to teach outside of one’s hometown. I had, on countless occasions, handed my teaching assistant a straight pin from my desk only to meet a puzzled face as she repeated her request for a pen. I smiled and assured Paige that she was right, spail was definitely a word. I had just misunderstood her.
2
The kindergarten teacher stood one hand on her hip, the other pointing a long red fingernail in the direction of Lamaar.
“Dooshy?” she yelled. “DOOSHY!!”
Although I knew why Lamaar was being scolded I was utterly bewildered at what this woman could possibly be saying to him.
It had taken me three months to realize that Lamaar did not know the names of all the alphabet letters or their sounds. I approached his kindergarten teacher who readily confessed that she passed him to first grade knowing that he was not prepared.
The district office had recently informed principals that children held back before the third grade were five times more likely to drop out of high school. This was due to national tests administered during third and fifth grade that were designed to “catch” students who were behind. Such a large number of kids were being held back at these junctures that it seemed futile to hold them back prior to third grade.
The principal decided that the best thing for Lamaar was to send him back to kindergarten for reading instruction and then spend the rest of the day in first grade. Recently Lamaar was arriving late to reading and that morning we discovered him taking a 20 minute water fountain detour during the eight foot journey across the hall.
“Dooshy? Dooshy!!” the kindergarten teacher yelled.
As I listened to her continue to shout this incomprehensible word I wondered what she could possibly be saying. What was a dooshy? Was it an action she expected him to perform? Was it a family nickname? Many of the students and faculty were related, so pet names were not uncommon. Could she possibly be calling him some abbreviated version of douche bag?! A year ago I would not have believed that was possible, but since then I had learned a lot of things happen in schools that I did not think were possible. After all, the school officially closed their spanking room only two years earlier. Then it all became clear.
“Dooooooshyyyyyyyyyy! Dooshy Lamaar? Do your mother tell you what to do when you’re in school? Do she? Do she?”
Lamaar shook his head. “No’m” he said.
“Ok then!” The kindergarten teacher straightened and pushed her glasses back into place. “From now on I expect you to come straight into my room from Ms. Kengeter’s class! You understand me boy?”
Lamaar nodded and left.
At one point I might have been appalled to hear a teacher not only repeatedly yelling at a student but doing so with improper grammar. But after six months I questioned could I really call the way I spoke “correct” if over half of the students, their parents, and most of the faculty spoke differently?
3
As a Title I school we endured intense test score scrutiny. Exams were frequent and once the results were returned the principal would hold staff meetings which included everyone from classroom teachers to the janitorial staff. The test scores of each individual’s class was put into bar graph next to those of other teachers in the district and placed on an overhead projector. Our school was notorious for low scores, particularly on the math benchmarks.
In years past, first graders often did poorly on the estimation section. I was determined to change this pattern and started working on estimating skills early in the year. We estimated how many marbles were in various sized jars, how many minutes it took to perform different activities, steps to the cafeteria, kids in a classroom, scoops of rice to fill a soda bottle, etc. When benchmark day arrived I felt confident that we would do well.
The first estimation question asked, “If they stood on each other’s shoulders, about how many men would equal the height of a house?” The choices were about 2, about 5, or about 15. As most of my students live in trailers, they circled ‘about 2.’ Strike one.
The second question asked “About how many bananas are in a bunch?” The options were 5, 15, or 30. Almost the entire class circled 30. I was frustrated by such stupid questions but at the same time could not believe how many students did not know how many bananas were in a bunch. When I asked my teaching assistant she just said, most of these kids don’t eat bananas at home.
The next morning I went into the cafeteria to round up any straggling students from breakfast. Today’s menu was sausage pizza. Apparently the presence of sausage qualified the dish as a breakfast item. I picked up a carton of milk and started down the lunch line. At the end of the counter near the registers was a huge pile of bananas. They were pulled apart and stacked in piles of about 30 and I realized that my kids were right.
4
After the breakfast pizza and realization that the only place my students had seen bananas were in cafeteria lunch lines I called my mother to see if she was willing to visit my class the next time she drove down to see me. My mother is a registered dietician and when I was in elementary school my teachers used to invite her to my class and talk about healthy eating habits. She made a tomato costume for the occasion which she stuffed with crumpled newspaper, filling out the red sack-like suit to make her about four times her regular width. The tomato suit was accompanied by a hat made from long newspaper strips painted green and glued in an asterisk for a stem. Thankfully my fellow classmates thought the outfit was hilarious and despite my personal feelings of humiliation, they dubbed my mom as dubbed as funny and cool.
The tomato costume was long gone but my mother said she was happy to speak to my class about healthy eating and good snack choices. When I told the students that my mother was going to visit they had lots of questions. “Will she bring us candy?” “Does she look like you?” “How old is she?” Then Diaysha raised her hand and asked, “Ms. Kengeter, what color is your mom?”
Earlier that year my boyfriend, Mr. Matt, came to visit my class. He was a juggler and the kids loved his performance. One student told me she was going to draw a picture for him. I said that was lovely. When she handed me the finished drawing there were three brown bodies flying over the ocean and across a sky of stars. She explained that it was Ms. Kengeter, Mr. Matt, and Frederica. My skin color varied in many of the student’s drawings but I always assumed they were just using the crayon at hand.
However, when I responded to Diaysha’s question, “What color is my mother? She’s white like me,” Diaysha promptly replied, “Oh no Ms. Kengeter, You’re not white. You have light brown skin.”
I casually corrected her but she continued to insist that I was simply “light skinned,” definitely not “white”. The other students were divided on the topic and it struck me how the students who were asserting that I was light brown did so with reassuring tones and seemed to be trying to comfort me.
5
Before Lamaar started going back to kindergarten he had been in a reading group with one other boy, also operating below grade level. I first met Jamal when he came to school with Mr. Zollinger, a man I thought was his grandfather. They were unable to come to the Back to School Night and another teacher, a relative of Jamal, drove them both to the building to meet me. I gave them the materials and explained the newsletter and supply list to Mr. Zollinger and he nodded. Before he left I asked him to sign the list that I would put out later that night for visiting parents. I chatted with Jamal while Mr. Zollinger signed in and the two left. When I picked up the clipboard there was only an ‘X’ mark for his name.
Jamal’s shy introduction belied a more tempestuous and impulsive temperament. He seemed to have no control over the volume of his voice, was unable to stay in his seat, and could not keep his hands to himself. While everyone sat at small tables I gave Jamal, the oldest in the class, a ‘grown-up’ desk so that he could have his own space. My teaching assistant spent most of the day working with him one-on-one. His eyes were bright and wild and head covered in soft golden fuzz that shone against his brown skin like a halo. He could be both the most affectionate child in the class, throwing his long lanky arms around my waist, as well as the most violent, seven years old but skilled at throwing punches and rallying a mob. He also put everything in his mouth. One afternoon I was telling the kindergarten teacher that he had just chewed through possibly the tenth pencil that week when she just looked at me and said, “Nothing you can do about that Ms. Kengeter. That’s just a side effect of him being a crack baby”.
I asked her how she knew that and she responded that everybody knows that. Jamal’s mother, like his grandfather, was and is a drug addict, which is why Jamal was being raised by his great grandfather, Mr. Zollinger. Mr. Zollinger had taken Jamal home from the hospital and raised him out in the country. Mr. Zollinger did not have a driver’s license and was illiterate, hence the ‘X’ signature on the parent sign-in sheet. When Jamal started kindergarten it was the first time he had seen children his own age. Before that he spent his days with a pack of dogs and the adults who brought his great grandfather food or other supplies. During his first year of school he was constantly under the tables, licking and biting the other students like the puppies back home. She concluded that he probably had some sort of disability but hadn’t been tested yet.
And so I discovered that the boy in the back of my class with the wild eyes and golden hair was really just a little Mowgli born in 1999 in North Carolina.
6
I joined Teach for America right out of college. I was drawn to the idea of working with a service organization in the US as opposed to the international focus of the Peace Corps, plus I would get teaching experience. During the final round of interviews, applicants are asked to rank their preferred teaching locations. You have to list about ten but great effort is made to place corps members in one of their top three choices.
I grew up in a rural area and had just finished four years at a college in the middle of Pennsylvania farmland. This was my chance to go some place new, live some place totally different. I wanted new experiences, to live outside my comfort zone, and work with kids with a different background from my own. My first choice was Washington D.C. I liked the idea of a living in a city and thought, ‘history, museums, art, politics? Sounds perfect!’ The idea of working with inner city youth sounded daunting and I was excited.
My second choice was Eastern North Carolina. I wasn’t brave enough to put three completely new and exotic locations on my list, so this was the safety pick. Out of the 22 possible places to work, I felt that this site would feel very familiar. The description of farms and rural life sounded like the places I had lived before and hoped I would not actually be assigned there.
The third choice was Las Vegas. The location and landscape seemed both foreign and romantic. I imagined grading papers under a Southwest sunset and looking out over cacti and desert. In addition to my naive musings this decision was also motivated by the fact that while reading the description of the region, a past corps member mentioned that they had taken hula lessons in the city. That irrelevant piece of information guaranteed its spot in my top three.
When my acceptance letter arrived I found I was placed Eastern North Carolina. I was disappointed and thought that I missed my chance at seeing a different part of the country and way of living. Yet, I was also relieved, thinking that at least I would be within my comfort zone and would have docile country children and not have to deal with the stress and violence of the city.
Little did I know I was headed for a foreign country where I did not speak the same language, eat the same food, or experience life the same way. My students lived in a land where spail and dooshy belonged in the dictionary and bananas come in bunches of thirty. Where a five year old knows skin color is more complicated and complex than just pigmentation and a boy can live six years without seeing another child his own age. I thought I knew the east coast, poverty, and rural life. I thought I knew my country and I thought I knew myself, but really it was a misunderstanding.
1
Our sound of the week was ā, the long a sound spelled ai and ay and four first graders sat around the curve of a large kidney table waiting for me to give them the next word.
“May,” I said and was quickly answered with, “Say.” “Tray.” “Lay.” “Play.” As each child contributed their rhyme I drew a small clean line below their name, keeping track of their correct responses with nice neat picket fences. There would not be a winner or a loser in our game but the fact that they earned “points” always got students excited.
“How about sail?”
“Mail.” “Jail.” “Whale.” “Spail.” The last answer came from Paige. She was a sweet girl with blonde hair that reached her waist and round cheeks like a cabbage patch doll. I drew tallies for the first three answers and looked at Paige.
“Can you tell me your word one more time?”
“Spay-il” she repeated, slower this time.
“Hmmm. Spail is not a word but it certainly rhymes with sail. Good job.” And I drew a fresh line under her name.
“ No. It’s a word” Paige continued with confidence. “You know, like my spailing words.”
Vowel sounds proved to be a tricky thing to teach outside of one’s hometown. I had, on countless occasions, handed my teaching assistant a straight pin from my desk only to meet a puzzled face as she repeated her request for a pen. I smiled and assured Paige that she was right, spail was definitely a word. I had just misunderstood her.
2
The kindergarten teacher stood one hand on her hip, the other pointing a long red fingernail in the direction of Lamaar.
“Dooshy?” she yelled. “DOOSHY!!”
Although I knew why Lamaar was being scolded I was utterly bewildered at what this woman could possibly be saying to him.
It had taken me three months to realize that Lamaar did not know the names of all the alphabet letters or their sounds. I approached his kindergarten teacher who readily confessed that she passed him to first grade knowing that he was not prepared.
The district office had recently informed principals that children held back before the third grade were five times more likely to drop out of high school. This was due to national tests administered during third and fifth grade that were designed to “catch” students who were behind. Such a large number of kids were being held back at these junctures that it seemed futile to hold them back prior to third grade.
The principal decided that the best thing for Lamaar was to send him back to kindergarten for reading instruction and then spend the rest of the day in first grade. Recently Lamaar was arriving late to reading and that morning we discovered him taking a 20 minute water fountain detour during the eight foot journey across the hall.
“Dooshy? Dooshy!!” the kindergarten teacher yelled.
As I listened to her continue to shout this incomprehensible word I wondered what she could possibly be saying. What was a dooshy? Was it an action she expected him to perform? Was it a family nickname? Many of the students and faculty were related, so pet names were not uncommon. Could she possibly be calling him some abbreviated version of douche bag?! A year ago I would not have believed that was possible, but since then I had learned a lot of things happen in schools that I did not think were possible. After all, the school officially closed their spanking room only two years earlier. Then it all became clear.
“Dooooooshyyyyyyyyyy! Dooshy Lamaar? Do your mother tell you what to do when you’re in school? Do she? Do she?”
Lamaar shook his head. “No’m” he said.
“Ok then!” The kindergarten teacher straightened and pushed her glasses back into place. “From now on I expect you to come straight into my room from Ms. Kengeter’s class! You understand me boy?”
Lamaar nodded and left.
At one point I might have been appalled to hear a teacher not only repeatedly yelling at a student but doing so with improper grammar. But after six months I questioned could I really call the way I spoke “correct” if over half of the students, their parents, and most of the faculty spoke differently?
3
As a Title I school we endured intense test score scrutiny. Exams were frequent and once the results were returned the principal would hold staff meetings which included everyone from classroom teachers to the janitorial staff. The test scores of each individual’s class was put into bar graph next to those of other teachers in the district and placed on an overhead projector. Our school was notorious for low scores, particularly on the math benchmarks.
In years past, first graders often did poorly on the estimation section. I was determined to change this pattern and started working on estimating skills early in the year. We estimated how many marbles were in various sized jars, how many minutes it took to perform different activities, steps to the cafeteria, kids in a classroom, scoops of rice to fill a soda bottle, etc. When benchmark day arrived I felt confident that we would do well.
The first estimation question asked, “If they stood on each other’s shoulders, about how many men would equal the height of a house?” The choices were about 2, about 5, or about 15. As most of my students live in trailers, they circled ‘about 2.’ Strike one.
The second question asked “About how many bananas are in a bunch?” The options were 5, 15, or 30. Almost the entire class circled 30. I was frustrated by such stupid questions but at the same time could not believe how many students did not know how many bananas were in a bunch. When I asked my teaching assistant she just said, most of these kids don’t eat bananas at home.
The next morning I went into the cafeteria to round up any straggling students from breakfast. Today’s menu was sausage pizza. Apparently the presence of sausage qualified the dish as a breakfast item. I picked up a carton of milk and started down the lunch line. At the end of the counter near the registers was a huge pile of bananas. They were pulled apart and stacked in piles of about 30 and I realized that my kids were right.
4
After the breakfast pizza and realization that the only place my students had seen bananas were in cafeteria lunch lines I called my mother to see if she was willing to visit my class the next time she drove down to see me. My mother is a registered dietician and when I was in elementary school my teachers used to invite her to my class and talk about healthy eating habits. She made a tomato costume for the occasion which she stuffed with crumpled newspaper, filling out the red sack-like suit to make her about four times her regular width. The tomato suit was accompanied by a hat made from long newspaper strips painted green and glued in an asterisk for a stem. Thankfully my fellow classmates thought the outfit was hilarious and despite my personal feelings of humiliation, they dubbed my mom as dubbed as funny and cool.
The tomato costume was long gone but my mother said she was happy to speak to my class about healthy eating and good snack choices. When I told the students that my mother was going to visit they had lots of questions. “Will she bring us candy?” “Does she look like you?” “How old is she?” Then Diaysha raised her hand and asked, “Ms. Kengeter, what color is your mom?”
Earlier that year my boyfriend, Mr. Matt, came to visit my class. He was a juggler and the kids loved his performance. One student told me she was going to draw a picture for him. I said that was lovely. When she handed me the finished drawing there were three brown bodies flying over the ocean and across a sky of stars. She explained that it was Ms. Kengeter, Mr. Matt, and Frederica. My skin color varied in many of the student’s drawings but I always assumed they were just using the crayon at hand.
However, when I responded to Diaysha’s question, “What color is my mother? She’s white like me,” Diaysha promptly replied, “Oh no Ms. Kengeter, You’re not white. You have light brown skin.”
I casually corrected her but she continued to insist that I was simply “light skinned,” definitely not “white”. The other students were divided on the topic and it struck me how the students who were asserting that I was light brown did so with reassuring tones and seemed to be trying to comfort me.
5
Before Lamaar started going back to kindergarten he had been in a reading group with one other boy, also operating below grade level. I first met Jamal when he came to school with Mr. Zollinger, a man I thought was his grandfather. They were unable to come to the Back to School Night and another teacher, a relative of Jamal, drove them both to the building to meet me. I gave them the materials and explained the newsletter and supply list to Mr. Zollinger and he nodded. Before he left I asked him to sign the list that I would put out later that night for visiting parents. I chatted with Jamal while Mr. Zollinger signed in and the two left. When I picked up the clipboard there was only an ‘X’ mark for his name.
Jamal’s shy introduction belied a more tempestuous and impulsive temperament. He seemed to have no control over the volume of his voice, was unable to stay in his seat, and could not keep his hands to himself. While everyone sat at small tables I gave Jamal, the oldest in the class, a ‘grown-up’ desk so that he could have his own space. My teaching assistant spent most of the day working with him one-on-one. His eyes were bright and wild and head covered in soft golden fuzz that shone against his brown skin like a halo. He could be both the most affectionate child in the class, throwing his long lanky arms around my waist, as well as the most violent, seven years old but skilled at throwing punches and rallying a mob. He also put everything in his mouth. One afternoon I was telling the kindergarten teacher that he had just chewed through possibly the tenth pencil that week when she just looked at me and said, “Nothing you can do about that Ms. Kengeter. That’s just a side effect of him being a crack baby”.
I asked her how she knew that and she responded that everybody knows that. Jamal’s mother, like his grandfather, was and is a drug addict, which is why Jamal was being raised by his great grandfather, Mr. Zollinger. Mr. Zollinger had taken Jamal home from the hospital and raised him out in the country. Mr. Zollinger did not have a driver’s license and was illiterate, hence the ‘X’ signature on the parent sign-in sheet. When Jamal started kindergarten it was the first time he had seen children his own age. Before that he spent his days with a pack of dogs and the adults who brought his great grandfather food or other supplies. During his first year of school he was constantly under the tables, licking and biting the other students like the puppies back home. She concluded that he probably had some sort of disability but hadn’t been tested yet.
And so I discovered that the boy in the back of my class with the wild eyes and golden hair was really just a little Mowgli born in 1999 in North Carolina.
6
I joined Teach for America right out of college. I was drawn to the idea of working with a service organization in the US as opposed to the international focus of the Peace Corps, plus I would get teaching experience. During the final round of interviews, applicants are asked to rank their preferred teaching locations. You have to list about ten but great effort is made to place corps members in one of their top three choices.
I grew up in a rural area and had just finished four years at a college in the middle of Pennsylvania farmland. This was my chance to go some place new, live some place totally different. I wanted new experiences, to live outside my comfort zone, and work with kids with a different background from my own. My first choice was Washington D.C. I liked the idea of a living in a city and thought, ‘history, museums, art, politics? Sounds perfect!’ The idea of working with inner city youth sounded daunting and I was excited.
My second choice was Eastern North Carolina. I wasn’t brave enough to put three completely new and exotic locations on my list, so this was the safety pick. Out of the 22 possible places to work, I felt that this site would feel very familiar. The description of farms and rural life sounded like the places I had lived before and hoped I would not actually be assigned there.
The third choice was Las Vegas. The location and landscape seemed both foreign and romantic. I imagined grading papers under a Southwest sunset and looking out over cacti and desert. In addition to my naive musings this decision was also motivated by the fact that while reading the description of the region, a past corps member mentioned that they had taken hula lessons in the city. That irrelevant piece of information guaranteed its spot in my top three.
When my acceptance letter arrived I found I was placed Eastern North Carolina. I was disappointed and thought that I missed my chance at seeing a different part of the country and way of living. Yet, I was also relieved, thinking that at least I would be within my comfort zone and would have docile country children and not have to deal with the stress and violence of the city.
Little did I know I was headed for a foreign country where I did not speak the same language, eat the same food, or experience life the same way. My students lived in a land where spail and dooshy belonged in the dictionary and bananas come in bunches of thirty. Where a five year old knows skin color is more complicated and complex than just pigmentation and a boy can live six years without seeing another child his own age. I thought I knew the east coast, poverty, and rural life. I thought I knew my country and I thought I knew myself, but really it was a misunderstanding.
Liz's Final
The Home-Visit
I had driven less than five minutes past the school when the paved road turned into gravel and less than ten when the gravel became dirt. South Warren Elementary School lay ten miles outside of Warrenton, North Carolina; a small town where everyone knows everyone.
It was for this very reason that I had decided to live outside of town and rented a house with four other Teach for America teachers also working in the district. We lived in a house that was typically rented out as a summer home and it rested on the banks of Lake Gaston. Shiny and new, a house with two fire places, a pool table, and a boat dock was more than I dreamed as my first home after college.
Warrenton on the other hand was tiny and falling apart. The Main Street showcased a library, gas station, dry cleaner, hair salon, and a pizza parlor. The elementary school with the highest test scores also sat in town but in order to reach South Warren I needed to drive past Main Street and out onto route 401, a narrow two lane road that ran between cotton and tobacco fields.
Later that year another first-year Teach For America teacher would be killed on her way to school by a logging truck. I thought about her each time I passed the stretch in the road where the tree trunks had lain scattered across the highway like an overturned bucket of Lincoln logs, the truck on its side in the ditch.
The only other notable landmark on this six mile stretch out of town was the Magnolia Manor Plantation. Today it is an upscale B&B; the description on its website reads, “This historic Warren County gem fell into disrepair following the War of Northern Aggression and has been respectfully rehabilitated to its original grandeur.” To earn some extra cash, I once helped cater a wedding at the plantation. A sea of white suits and women in big hats sat under the low branches of the magnolia trees. The men smoked cigars and drank frosty glasses of mint juleps while the ladies sipped lemonade and sweet tea from mason jars.
If you were driving down 401 and not going to the Plantation, you would probably never notice a small street sign on the right that read Parktown Road. This street led further back into the country past the Coley Springs Baptist Church to a fork in the woods. South Warren Elementary School was down the road less traveled and was as far as I ever went until that day.
It was early fall, still warm in North Carolina, and I had my windows rolled down. On the seat beside me lay a pile of homework, blank except for the name Shane scrawled across the top in thick black jagged lines.
During my Teach for America training, various supervisors and mentors reiterated the significance of home-visits. It was a great way to connect with and invest parents and students by showing families that you cared enough to come to them. These visits could be especially important if you lived in an area where the parents may not have access to a car or worked a schedule that did not enable them to attend afterschool conferences or meetings.
So here I was, about to make my first home visit. Shane had not completed his homework in about two weeks and I called his mother to arrange for a meeting. She was thrilled to not have to come to school and a date was set.
Shane Hosgorn’s reputation arrived in the classroom before the boy ever set foot in the building. The first indication that Shane might be a handful came from my teaching assistant. We were making name tags for the tiny blue chairs during teacher pre-service days and I was reading the names off the class roster. When I got to Shane she said, “ooooooooo boy….so we’ve got Shane.” I asked who he was and she hesitated before cautiously replying,”He’s wild….but he’s allright”.
Other reactions were not so generous and the little soon-to-be-first grader quickly had a bulging resume of misdemeanors. “He bites.” “ He steals.” “ He lies.” “He has no friends.” “And don’t expect any help from his mother neither!” His kindergarten teacher from the previous year told me that one afternoon she just could not take him anymore so during lunch she put him in her car and drove him home.
Prepared with a laundry list of warnings, I was amazed when a quiet, blonde boy with a camouflage backpack took a seat in the chair marked Shane. He was one of three Caucasians in the class that year and smaller than the other kids, but anyone who had gone to kindergarten with him knew that you didn’t mess with Shane.
He seemed to have leapt right off the pages of Where the Wild Things Are, and perhaps it is this mental connection that explains why when I think back on his impish grin I see two rows of perfect little fangs. He was Max incarnate and in addition to gnashing his terrible teeth and rolling his terrible eyes he also howled at the top of his lungs, slammed his head on the desk, and sharpened his pencils into spears which he used to repeatedly stab into his notebooks and worksheets.
His handwriting was illegible and he would attack the paper as though he were trying to carve his letters into wood. The result would be deep gouges and slashes in his workbooks, bits of led snapping as Shane slowly pushed his pencil across and into the page, knuckles white from the strain of his grip.
The kindergarten teacher gave me the directions to his home. Just make a right out of the parking lot and drive until the road ends. You’ll see a trailer park; his is one of the first, right under the street light.
It was early in the afternoon and the sun was out. Dust puffed up from the road as I drove across the dirt that was slowly turning grassy. When I reached the trailer park I saw a woman in professional dress getting out of a dark car. Shane was outside with his mother and sister. They had had moved to NC the previous year from Pennsylvania. I would later learn Shane’s biological father was still in Pennsylvania, imprisoned for sexually abusing both children. The kids currently lived with their mother and her boyfriend, both of whom were recovering alcoholics and drug addicts.
I slowed my car to stop, parking a little ways up from the other vehicle, and grabbed the blank homework before getting out of the car. Something was wrong. Ms. Hosgorn stood, sweating in the sun, listening to the woman in the suit, and as I walked over I could see her face begin to change.
I had arrived seconds after a social worker who was there to take the children to foster care as their home was determined unfit for children. The trailer was filthy and the floor covered in dog feces and holes that revealed the ground below. The kids had been sleeping on a couch in the living room and when electricity was shut off this past week the state decided to intervene.
The social worker told the kids to get into her car. Shane’s sister began to quietly acquiesce but little Shane started to writhe and scream for his mamma. Their mother turned to me, cried to me, begged me to do something, anything; they were taking her babies. The next five minutes were a blur of screams and cries, hands being pulled apart and car doors closing and locking. The social worker looked at me her face tired and sad but unapologetic. She got into the car with the hysterical children and dust kicked up from the tires as she drove from grass to dirt and dirt back to pavement.
Once the car was out of sight I realized Ms. Hosgorn was crying on my shoulder. She was hot, sweaty, overweight, and her heart had just been ripped out. I stood dumbly as she sobbed, one hand stroking her back the other holding the forgotten worksheets.
I cried all the way home.
Back in school no one knew any different and I kept Shane’s secret for him. His behavior remained unchanged and a few months later he was back with his mother. Around Thanksgiving social services connected him with a big brother program and he was assigned to an eighteen year old boy named La’Shon. Shane latched onto this older male figure like a barnacle to a rock. He talked about La’Shon constantly, always referring to him as his brother, and used him to threaten other kids. “Don’t do that or my brother will beat you up!”
Occasionally I would receive a note that La’Shon would pick Shane up from school. On these days Shane would talk of nothing else but what he and La’Shon were going to do that afternoon. But, as might be expected of an eighteen year old, something often came up or he would run late and was not there by the end of school. On these afternoons Shane’s tough image was dropped as he hid in the corner where the kids couldn’t see him and cried and cried into his tiny dirty palms.
I wanted to hold him, take him home with me, show him the low hanging branches of Magnolia Manor or teach in to swim in the lake beside my house. Instead I handed him a tissue, put him on the bus, and watched him draw into himself, curling into a tight little ball against the window as the bus drove away from the school and down a paved road that would eventually turn to dirt.
I had driven less than five minutes past the school when the paved road turned into gravel and less than ten when the gravel became dirt. South Warren Elementary School lay ten miles outside of Warrenton, North Carolina; a small town where everyone knows everyone.
It was for this very reason that I had decided to live outside of town and rented a house with four other Teach for America teachers also working in the district. We lived in a house that was typically rented out as a summer home and it rested on the banks of Lake Gaston. Shiny and new, a house with two fire places, a pool table, and a boat dock was more than I dreamed as my first home after college.
Warrenton on the other hand was tiny and falling apart. The Main Street showcased a library, gas station, dry cleaner, hair salon, and a pizza parlor. The elementary school with the highest test scores also sat in town but in order to reach South Warren I needed to drive past Main Street and out onto route 401, a narrow two lane road that ran between cotton and tobacco fields.
Later that year another first-year Teach For America teacher would be killed on her way to school by a logging truck. I thought about her each time I passed the stretch in the road where the tree trunks had lain scattered across the highway like an overturned bucket of Lincoln logs, the truck on its side in the ditch.
The only other notable landmark on this six mile stretch out of town was the Magnolia Manor Plantation. Today it is an upscale B&B; the description on its website reads, “This historic Warren County gem fell into disrepair following the War of Northern Aggression and has been respectfully rehabilitated to its original grandeur.” To earn some extra cash, I once helped cater a wedding at the plantation. A sea of white suits and women in big hats sat under the low branches of the magnolia trees. The men smoked cigars and drank frosty glasses of mint juleps while the ladies sipped lemonade and sweet tea from mason jars.
If you were driving down 401 and not going to the Plantation, you would probably never notice a small street sign on the right that read Parktown Road. This street led further back into the country past the Coley Springs Baptist Church to a fork in the woods. South Warren Elementary School was down the road less traveled and was as far as I ever went until that day.
It was early fall, still warm in North Carolina, and I had my windows rolled down. On the seat beside me lay a pile of homework, blank except for the name Shane scrawled across the top in thick black jagged lines.
During my Teach for America training, various supervisors and mentors reiterated the significance of home-visits. It was a great way to connect with and invest parents and students by showing families that you cared enough to come to them. These visits could be especially important if you lived in an area where the parents may not have access to a car or worked a schedule that did not enable them to attend afterschool conferences or meetings.
So here I was, about to make my first home visit. Shane had not completed his homework in about two weeks and I called his mother to arrange for a meeting. She was thrilled to not have to come to school and a date was set.
Shane Hosgorn’s reputation arrived in the classroom before the boy ever set foot in the building. The first indication that Shane might be a handful came from my teaching assistant. We were making name tags for the tiny blue chairs during teacher pre-service days and I was reading the names off the class roster. When I got to Shane she said, “ooooooooo boy….so we’ve got Shane.” I asked who he was and she hesitated before cautiously replying,”He’s wild….but he’s allright”.
Other reactions were not so generous and the little soon-to-be-first grader quickly had a bulging resume of misdemeanors. “He bites.” “ He steals.” “ He lies.” “He has no friends.” “And don’t expect any help from his mother neither!” His kindergarten teacher from the previous year told me that one afternoon she just could not take him anymore so during lunch she put him in her car and drove him home.
Prepared with a laundry list of warnings, I was amazed when a quiet, blonde boy with a camouflage backpack took a seat in the chair marked Shane. He was one of three Caucasians in the class that year and smaller than the other kids, but anyone who had gone to kindergarten with him knew that you didn’t mess with Shane.
He seemed to have leapt right off the pages of Where the Wild Things Are, and perhaps it is this mental connection that explains why when I think back on his impish grin I see two rows of perfect little fangs. He was Max incarnate and in addition to gnashing his terrible teeth and rolling his terrible eyes he also howled at the top of his lungs, slammed his head on the desk, and sharpened his pencils into spears which he used to repeatedly stab into his notebooks and worksheets.
His handwriting was illegible and he would attack the paper as though he were trying to carve his letters into wood. The result would be deep gouges and slashes in his workbooks, bits of led snapping as Shane slowly pushed his pencil across and into the page, knuckles white from the strain of his grip.
The kindergarten teacher gave me the directions to his home. Just make a right out of the parking lot and drive until the road ends. You’ll see a trailer park; his is one of the first, right under the street light.
It was early in the afternoon and the sun was out. Dust puffed up from the road as I drove across the dirt that was slowly turning grassy. When I reached the trailer park I saw a woman in professional dress getting out of a dark car. Shane was outside with his mother and sister. They had had moved to NC the previous year from Pennsylvania. I would later learn Shane’s biological father was still in Pennsylvania, imprisoned for sexually abusing both children. The kids currently lived with their mother and her boyfriend, both of whom were recovering alcoholics and drug addicts.
I slowed my car to stop, parking a little ways up from the other vehicle, and grabbed the blank homework before getting out of the car. Something was wrong. Ms. Hosgorn stood, sweating in the sun, listening to the woman in the suit, and as I walked over I could see her face begin to change.
I had arrived seconds after a social worker who was there to take the children to foster care as their home was determined unfit for children. The trailer was filthy and the floor covered in dog feces and holes that revealed the ground below. The kids had been sleeping on a couch in the living room and when electricity was shut off this past week the state decided to intervene.
The social worker told the kids to get into her car. Shane’s sister began to quietly acquiesce but little Shane started to writhe and scream for his mamma. Their mother turned to me, cried to me, begged me to do something, anything; they were taking her babies. The next five minutes were a blur of screams and cries, hands being pulled apart and car doors closing and locking. The social worker looked at me her face tired and sad but unapologetic. She got into the car with the hysterical children and dust kicked up from the tires as she drove from grass to dirt and dirt back to pavement.
Once the car was out of sight I realized Ms. Hosgorn was crying on my shoulder. She was hot, sweaty, overweight, and her heart had just been ripped out. I stood dumbly as she sobbed, one hand stroking her back the other holding the forgotten worksheets.
I cried all the way home.
Back in school no one knew any different and I kept Shane’s secret for him. His behavior remained unchanged and a few months later he was back with his mother. Around Thanksgiving social services connected him with a big brother program and he was assigned to an eighteen year old boy named La’Shon. Shane latched onto this older male figure like a barnacle to a rock. He talked about La’Shon constantly, always referring to him as his brother, and used him to threaten other kids. “Don’t do that or my brother will beat you up!”
Occasionally I would receive a note that La’Shon would pick Shane up from school. On these days Shane would talk of nothing else but what he and La’Shon were going to do that afternoon. But, as might be expected of an eighteen year old, something often came up or he would run late and was not there by the end of school. On these afternoons Shane’s tough image was dropped as he hid in the corner where the kids couldn’t see him and cried and cried into his tiny dirty palms.
I wanted to hold him, take him home with me, show him the low hanging branches of Magnolia Manor or teach in to swim in the lake beside my house. Instead I handed him a tissue, put him on the bus, and watched him draw into himself, curling into a tight little ball against the window as the bus drove away from the school and down a paved road that would eventually turn to dirt.
Liz's Reading Responses
(1) Mark Freeman: Autobiographical Understanding and Narrative Inquiry
Freeman’s chapter investigates the possibilities of narrative inquiry as a “way toward a more integrated, adequate, and humane vision for studying the human realm”. Current understanding of autobiography and narrative is relative to today’s society and culture, thus Freeman gives consideration to the development of autobiography and personal narrative.
The mythic tradition of universal stories about timeless characters and roles reflected a communal society where the individual understands their life as part of a community rather than an isolated existence. Freeman shows how this way of thinking shifted over time as seen in St. Augustine’s Confessions, an example of “autobiographical reflection”. Yet, the role of God as a … in a person’s life, as … St. Augustine, would change again and autobiography expanded with the belief that an individual was the “director” of their own lives, thus a more isolated understanding of humans compared to the community of antiquity, allowed for the possibility to account individual experience and interpretation of the personal past.
This history was interesting as it reveals the evolution of autobiographical thinking. It seems that as a larger society we are continuing on a trajectory moving from communal understanding toward greater isolation. I think about the online communities being formed and wonder how they exist in this framework. While it is a site of communal life and activity, the individuals, as they exist in the world, are often in total isolation as they engage with this removed community.
Freeman also demonstrates how autobiography and narratives invite questions about truth and reality. He asserts that creativity and skill in writing should be valued but not above “truth.” Yet, this is problematized as lived experience is inevitably altered when expressed in words. While objectivity and total ‘accuracy’ is impossible, creativity should be employed in an honest and responsible manner.
This portion of Freeman’s chapter has resonated with me. I thought about it during the class and continue to reflect on narrative, truth, creativity, and invention now that the course has ended. If five different people were asked to write a narrative of a shared experience, their accounts would most likely differ, perhaps significantly. Yet while none would necessarily be fiction, neither would any completely represent the reality of the lived experience. Some might remember things differently or have inaccurate recollections. Does this make their writing fictive or a lie? I believe not. I agree that it when writing personal narratives one must be as honest as possible while writing in the most interesting and creative way possible. However, I find qualities like exaggeration and embellishment sticky points. In writing I feel these techniques have a similar function to when one draws out the light and shadow in a painting. Ultimately, I think it is essential to employ these with responsibility and integrity.
(2) Ed Check: My Working-Class Roots in an Academic War Zone: Creating Space to Grieve…
Check’s article demonstrates how autobiography can give insight into one’s position, choices, reactions, motivations, art work, and pedagogy. He uses personal narrative as a method of research but discusses how this methodology is often met with criticism and skepticisms. Nevertheless, his narrative accounts of his experiences with class, gender, sexuality, and religion reveal a multitude of struggles. Through autobiographical writing he is thus able to not only articulate these struggles but how he responded to them and how they have and continue to inform his present life.
Check’s writing models how personal narrative can be used to grapple with past pain and conflict as well as construct an understanding of identity, motivation, action, and reaction. By reflecting on the failings and gaps in his own education and the negative effect it had, readers see how and why Check utilizes particular pedagogical practices and his positions on certain issues. He also succeeds in giving voice to a working-class, religious, homosexual experience and thus contributes to a community obscured by the a “main stream” middle-class heterosexual experience.
I often question the use of personal narrative when teaching and wonder how much (if any) it can or should be shared with students. Check demonstrates the way narrative can be used in a productive manner in the classroom. It might provide a different position, challenge the views held by the students, provide comfort for those feeling isolated, or model the benefits and possibilities of introspective behavior. I use my personal and family history for understanding my self and the world thus it feels natural for me to bring this into the classroom. Check’s writing has motivated me to not only continue to use personal experience (now with confidence) as I teach but perhaps incorporate more assignments that call for student personal reflection and narrative.
(3) Rosemarie Garland-Thompson: Shape structures Story
Garland-Thompson considers how shape (her term for the visible body) creates a particular story. She notes that our culture has a narrow conception of the body and difference or deviations are considered a disability. This term in turn has been used to tell a very specific and limiting story. Garland-Thompson thus describes four stories which “recast traditional disability plots” specifically in terms of positive narratives rather than negative with the often absent themes of sexuality and community.
The documentary Murderball reveals a community of male athletes experiencing success and growth because “rather than in spite of a disability.” Their sexuality and masculinity is not diminished but rather shown to flourish through the film. Garland-Thompson uses Cheryl Marie Wade’s poem, I AM NOT ONE OF THE as an example an artist weaving together stereotypic images and stories associated with disability with ones of power and strength creating a new narrative. My Body Politic, a memoir by S. Linton is praised for the way disability is shown to give the individual a new sense of self and community. Finally, Garland-Thompson shares her own experience at the annual Society for Disability Studies dance and reveals an energetic, wild, sexy group of scholars- not only challenging ideas regarding the “limiting” nature of a disability but also the reserved temperament of a scholar.
Like Clark and Eisenhaur’s articles, Garland-Thompson demonstrates how narrative can be used to build community, dispel normative myths regarding the body, and be empowering for the writer as well as readers.
I found the last portion of this essay the most engaging. It certainly was a personal narrative and Garland-Thompson was used it to reveal the same themes and challenge the traditional to the disability story as in her pervious examples. It was more interesting to read than her summaries and I felt she really succeed in showing as opposed to telling, making the story more personal as well as entertaining. I wished the rest of the article had been written in the same manner, however, as it stands it is an interesting combination of writing styles.
(4) William Tierney: Get real: Representing Reality
Tierney addresses the “crisis in representation”, an issue frequently discussed among qualitative researchers. He traces the usage of the phrase and shows that it ultimately calls for researchers to reconsider the way data and research is written and presented. Although the definitions of the crisis, as well as its solutions, differ among researchers and scholars, the general remedy has been to adopt narrative forms of writing and place an emphasis on the author/ researcher as a way of being reflexive and clarifying one’s position. Yet Tierney feels this is too simplistic and placing the researcher at the center of the writing is not necessarily the best solution.
Tierney criticizes the ‘one-size’ fits all approach and recommends researchers not only educate themselves and learn new forms of writing (rather than just assuming they are qualified or skillful enough to write a narrative or play) but to let what is going to be written, who it is written about, and who will be reading it, inform stylistic decisions.
Tierney lists the ways researchers have attempted to address this crisis: memoir, narrative, plays, autobiographical narrative. Yet he is critical of the assumption that a researcher, trained as a qualitative writer, can adopt new genres and styles of writing and successfully employ them without training or skill. He asserts that among those contributing to this problem are universities who continue to train graduate students in traditional ways of writing research and require assistant professors to publish in traditional refereed journals in order to secure tenure. Neither practice invites or encourages the exploration of new forms or writing let alone training. He also faults publication committees who only use traditional qualitative researchers to judge the quality of work and determine if it is publishable rather than those trained or skilled in creative writing or varying genres.
I wish Tierney had employed some of his own suggestions in this piece; or if he accompanied this chapter with the same information in another format. His suggestions and recommendations resonated with me. I love to read novels and creative writing and so many of the articles I have encountered in graduate school have been dry and often boring. The pedagogical suggestions at the close of the chapter are ideas I would like to employ in my classroom.
(5) Rachel Remen: Kitchen Table Wisdom
When I first began to read this article/ preface I could not understand why it was included in our reading list. It is preface to Kitchen Table Wisdom and describes the birth of the book. After being encouraged by a friend to submit a short story to a publisher, Remen found herself in a meeting with an editor. Unable to make an outline, come up with a theme, or identify a method of working, the editor sent her away with the task of writing four hundred pages about whatever mattered to her. She had an equally unsuccessful meeting with a writing coach who left her with the advice to remember that Remen was not a writer and to just write what she knew.
In the end Remen’s four hundred pages were a series of short stories. She was insecure about these little stories and felt there was much still to be done, especially since it lacked citations and references. However, her editor assured her it was complete in its current form and the book was met with praise and acceptance by a larger public.
I found Remen’s story motivating and feel it is an example, model, and rationale for narrative inquiry. The discussion of a writer versus author harkens back to Tierney’s article where he calls for researchers not to assume they can pick up and employ any genre of writing. Remen wrote in a narrative manner because she had a collection of stories to tell and that was what she knew, she did not try to put herself into a tradition that she did not belong in.
The writing itself, as a preface, is engaging and enlightening. It is both the story of a book as well as a story of Remen’s discovery of herself as an author (I contest her opinion that she is not a writer). It challenges ideas of who can be an author and how one must go about writing. Most importantly, it reveals the significance and importance of writing what we know, and that this can be a source of credibility. Her tale reveals the importance of telling stories and the importance of practicing truthfulness and honesty in our writing. Remen’s account demonstrates that narrative can indeed be a vehicle for understanding the world and ourselves, building community, and dealing with hardship. And although one must be responsible and reflexive about entering into the position of an author, it can be done successfully by those untrained.
(6) Jenny Newman: Short Story Writing
Jenny Newman’s essay, “Short Story Writing” provides practical advice written in a reader/ writer friendly manner. She addresses some basic elements of writing such as how to begin writing, the characters, point of view, dialogue, plot and ending your story. The chapter is broken into these six sections, each beginning with a description followed by tips and advice for the success, common mishaps and errors, and sprinkled with examples from successful authors. Her chapter also includes writing exercises to help writers develop their skills.
I found this chapter, as well as the other essays taken from The Writers Workbook, incredibly useful. I referred to it frequently during class and have continued to do so as I wrote my short stories. The following are points that I found particularly helpful and have made small comments about the ways I tried to employ them.
“Select those images and details which will resonate in the mind of her reader or listener, and make him feel he knows all he needs to know about characters and setting. The short story writer depends on what Raymond Carver (1986) calls ‘a unique and exact way of looking at things, and [on] finding the right context for expressing that way of looking.’” (53)
“Enter the first scene as late as you can without being baffling, and plant a ‘hook’ or attention grabber…Help your reader picture the setting…but do not load her with information, or insert long flashbacks which distract her from the narrative present.” (54) [I love this and definitely tried to start in the middle of a scene. However, I really struggled with extraneous and distracting insertions as I tend to take lots of tangents and incorporate flash backs in my writing]
“Keep an eye open for those who live at odds with the so-called mainstream” (54) [not really applicable to my current writing but something for the future!]
“Introduce your story people economically and memorably. It is more entertaining to reveal a character through the way he or she drives, smokes, or reads the paper than by resorting to tired descriptions of eye color.” (55) [Really hard to do!]
“Learn to be precise.” (55) [see previous comment!]
“Be sparing with adverbs. If you must mention volume, it is better to use a verb like bellow…dispense with speech tags where is it possible without sacrificing clarity.” (59) [I definitely tried this when writing dialogue, both in A Loose Tooth and Misunderstandings part 1)]
“Raymond Carver also identifies tension as a key element, but for him it comes from, ‘ a sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion.’” (60)
“For Aristotle successful plots have a beginning, which introduces conflict, a middle section which develops it, and an ending which resolves it.” (61)
“It is better to focus on small disagreements, and let them be keenly felt, than to snatch at a huge issue and fail to develop it.” (61) [Both of these quotes from page 61 were very hard for me when writing Misunderstandings. I had a lot of small things I wanted to say and felt that focusing on just one would stretch it into flimsyness, thus I decided to tell a series of shorts. However, I still waver over if they are over or underdeveloped.]
“…you need not end with a spelt out statement, as long as you signal ‘a tangible change of some sort; a distinct shift in consciousness, a deepening of insight.’…either way, make sure a change or realization takes place, because without it there can be no story.” (62) [I constantly strive for this- I know I read a quotations in one of the readings, perhaps it was How to Write a Novel, that quoted an author as saying ‘figure out what you want to say then do your best not to say it’ (I paraphrase). This has been a sort of mantra over the past few weeks.]
Freeman’s chapter investigates the possibilities of narrative inquiry as a “way toward a more integrated, adequate, and humane vision for studying the human realm”. Current understanding of autobiography and narrative is relative to today’s society and culture, thus Freeman gives consideration to the development of autobiography and personal narrative.
The mythic tradition of universal stories about timeless characters and roles reflected a communal society where the individual understands their life as part of a community rather than an isolated existence. Freeman shows how this way of thinking shifted over time as seen in St. Augustine’s Confessions, an example of “autobiographical reflection”. Yet, the role of God as a … in a person’s life, as … St. Augustine, would change again and autobiography expanded with the belief that an individual was the “director” of their own lives, thus a more isolated understanding of humans compared to the community of antiquity, allowed for the possibility to account individual experience and interpretation of the personal past.
This history was interesting as it reveals the evolution of autobiographical thinking. It seems that as a larger society we are continuing on a trajectory moving from communal understanding toward greater isolation. I think about the online communities being formed and wonder how they exist in this framework. While it is a site of communal life and activity, the individuals, as they exist in the world, are often in total isolation as they engage with this removed community.
Freeman also demonstrates how autobiography and narratives invite questions about truth and reality. He asserts that creativity and skill in writing should be valued but not above “truth.” Yet, this is problematized as lived experience is inevitably altered when expressed in words. While objectivity and total ‘accuracy’ is impossible, creativity should be employed in an honest and responsible manner.
This portion of Freeman’s chapter has resonated with me. I thought about it during the class and continue to reflect on narrative, truth, creativity, and invention now that the course has ended. If five different people were asked to write a narrative of a shared experience, their accounts would most likely differ, perhaps significantly. Yet while none would necessarily be fiction, neither would any completely represent the reality of the lived experience. Some might remember things differently or have inaccurate recollections. Does this make their writing fictive or a lie? I believe not. I agree that it when writing personal narratives one must be as honest as possible while writing in the most interesting and creative way possible. However, I find qualities like exaggeration and embellishment sticky points. In writing I feel these techniques have a similar function to when one draws out the light and shadow in a painting. Ultimately, I think it is essential to employ these with responsibility and integrity.
(2) Ed Check: My Working-Class Roots in an Academic War Zone: Creating Space to Grieve…
Check’s article demonstrates how autobiography can give insight into one’s position, choices, reactions, motivations, art work, and pedagogy. He uses personal narrative as a method of research but discusses how this methodology is often met with criticism and skepticisms. Nevertheless, his narrative accounts of his experiences with class, gender, sexuality, and religion reveal a multitude of struggles. Through autobiographical writing he is thus able to not only articulate these struggles but how he responded to them and how they have and continue to inform his present life.
Check’s writing models how personal narrative can be used to grapple with past pain and conflict as well as construct an understanding of identity, motivation, action, and reaction. By reflecting on the failings and gaps in his own education and the negative effect it had, readers see how and why Check utilizes particular pedagogical practices and his positions on certain issues. He also succeeds in giving voice to a working-class, religious, homosexual experience and thus contributes to a community obscured by the a “main stream” middle-class heterosexual experience.
I often question the use of personal narrative when teaching and wonder how much (if any) it can or should be shared with students. Check demonstrates the way narrative can be used in a productive manner in the classroom. It might provide a different position, challenge the views held by the students, provide comfort for those feeling isolated, or model the benefits and possibilities of introspective behavior. I use my personal and family history for understanding my self and the world thus it feels natural for me to bring this into the classroom. Check’s writing has motivated me to not only continue to use personal experience (now with confidence) as I teach but perhaps incorporate more assignments that call for student personal reflection and narrative.
(3) Rosemarie Garland-Thompson: Shape structures Story
Garland-Thompson considers how shape (her term for the visible body) creates a particular story. She notes that our culture has a narrow conception of the body and difference or deviations are considered a disability. This term in turn has been used to tell a very specific and limiting story. Garland-Thompson thus describes four stories which “recast traditional disability plots” specifically in terms of positive narratives rather than negative with the often absent themes of sexuality and community.
The documentary Murderball reveals a community of male athletes experiencing success and growth because “rather than in spite of a disability.” Their sexuality and masculinity is not diminished but rather shown to flourish through the film. Garland-Thompson uses Cheryl Marie Wade’s poem, I AM NOT ONE OF THE as an example an artist weaving together stereotypic images and stories associated with disability with ones of power and strength creating a new narrative. My Body Politic, a memoir by S. Linton is praised for the way disability is shown to give the individual a new sense of self and community. Finally, Garland-Thompson shares her own experience at the annual Society for Disability Studies dance and reveals an energetic, wild, sexy group of scholars- not only challenging ideas regarding the “limiting” nature of a disability but also the reserved temperament of a scholar.
Like Clark and Eisenhaur’s articles, Garland-Thompson demonstrates how narrative can be used to build community, dispel normative myths regarding the body, and be empowering for the writer as well as readers.
I found the last portion of this essay the most engaging. It certainly was a personal narrative and Garland-Thompson was used it to reveal the same themes and challenge the traditional to the disability story as in her pervious examples. It was more interesting to read than her summaries and I felt she really succeed in showing as opposed to telling, making the story more personal as well as entertaining. I wished the rest of the article had been written in the same manner, however, as it stands it is an interesting combination of writing styles.
(4) William Tierney: Get real: Representing Reality
Tierney addresses the “crisis in representation”, an issue frequently discussed among qualitative researchers. He traces the usage of the phrase and shows that it ultimately calls for researchers to reconsider the way data and research is written and presented. Although the definitions of the crisis, as well as its solutions, differ among researchers and scholars, the general remedy has been to adopt narrative forms of writing and place an emphasis on the author/ researcher as a way of being reflexive and clarifying one’s position. Yet Tierney feels this is too simplistic and placing the researcher at the center of the writing is not necessarily the best solution.
Tierney criticizes the ‘one-size’ fits all approach and recommends researchers not only educate themselves and learn new forms of writing (rather than just assuming they are qualified or skillful enough to write a narrative or play) but to let what is going to be written, who it is written about, and who will be reading it, inform stylistic decisions.
Tierney lists the ways researchers have attempted to address this crisis: memoir, narrative, plays, autobiographical narrative. Yet he is critical of the assumption that a researcher, trained as a qualitative writer, can adopt new genres and styles of writing and successfully employ them without training or skill. He asserts that among those contributing to this problem are universities who continue to train graduate students in traditional ways of writing research and require assistant professors to publish in traditional refereed journals in order to secure tenure. Neither practice invites or encourages the exploration of new forms or writing let alone training. He also faults publication committees who only use traditional qualitative researchers to judge the quality of work and determine if it is publishable rather than those trained or skilled in creative writing or varying genres.
I wish Tierney had employed some of his own suggestions in this piece; or if he accompanied this chapter with the same information in another format. His suggestions and recommendations resonated with me. I love to read novels and creative writing and so many of the articles I have encountered in graduate school have been dry and often boring. The pedagogical suggestions at the close of the chapter are ideas I would like to employ in my classroom.
(5) Rachel Remen: Kitchen Table Wisdom
When I first began to read this article/ preface I could not understand why it was included in our reading list. It is preface to Kitchen Table Wisdom and describes the birth of the book. After being encouraged by a friend to submit a short story to a publisher, Remen found herself in a meeting with an editor. Unable to make an outline, come up with a theme, or identify a method of working, the editor sent her away with the task of writing four hundred pages about whatever mattered to her. She had an equally unsuccessful meeting with a writing coach who left her with the advice to remember that Remen was not a writer and to just write what she knew.
In the end Remen’s four hundred pages were a series of short stories. She was insecure about these little stories and felt there was much still to be done, especially since it lacked citations and references. However, her editor assured her it was complete in its current form and the book was met with praise and acceptance by a larger public.
I found Remen’s story motivating and feel it is an example, model, and rationale for narrative inquiry. The discussion of a writer versus author harkens back to Tierney’s article where he calls for researchers not to assume they can pick up and employ any genre of writing. Remen wrote in a narrative manner because she had a collection of stories to tell and that was what she knew, she did not try to put herself into a tradition that she did not belong in.
The writing itself, as a preface, is engaging and enlightening. It is both the story of a book as well as a story of Remen’s discovery of herself as an author (I contest her opinion that she is not a writer). It challenges ideas of who can be an author and how one must go about writing. Most importantly, it reveals the significance and importance of writing what we know, and that this can be a source of credibility. Her tale reveals the importance of telling stories and the importance of practicing truthfulness and honesty in our writing. Remen’s account demonstrates that narrative can indeed be a vehicle for understanding the world and ourselves, building community, and dealing with hardship. And although one must be responsible and reflexive about entering into the position of an author, it can be done successfully by those untrained.
(6) Jenny Newman: Short Story Writing
Jenny Newman’s essay, “Short Story Writing” provides practical advice written in a reader/ writer friendly manner. She addresses some basic elements of writing such as how to begin writing, the characters, point of view, dialogue, plot and ending your story. The chapter is broken into these six sections, each beginning with a description followed by tips and advice for the success, common mishaps and errors, and sprinkled with examples from successful authors. Her chapter also includes writing exercises to help writers develop their skills.
I found this chapter, as well as the other essays taken from The Writers Workbook, incredibly useful. I referred to it frequently during class and have continued to do so as I wrote my short stories. The following are points that I found particularly helpful and have made small comments about the ways I tried to employ them.
“Select those images and details which will resonate in the mind of her reader or listener, and make him feel he knows all he needs to know about characters and setting. The short story writer depends on what Raymond Carver (1986) calls ‘a unique and exact way of looking at things, and [on] finding the right context for expressing that way of looking.’” (53)
“Enter the first scene as late as you can without being baffling, and plant a ‘hook’ or attention grabber…Help your reader picture the setting…but do not load her with information, or insert long flashbacks which distract her from the narrative present.” (54) [I love this and definitely tried to start in the middle of a scene. However, I really struggled with extraneous and distracting insertions as I tend to take lots of tangents and incorporate flash backs in my writing]
“Keep an eye open for those who live at odds with the so-called mainstream” (54) [not really applicable to my current writing but something for the future!]
“Introduce your story people economically and memorably. It is more entertaining to reveal a character through the way he or she drives, smokes, or reads the paper than by resorting to tired descriptions of eye color.” (55) [Really hard to do!]
“Learn to be precise.” (55) [see previous comment!]
“Be sparing with adverbs. If you must mention volume, it is better to use a verb like bellow…dispense with speech tags where is it possible without sacrificing clarity.” (59) [I definitely tried this when writing dialogue, both in A Loose Tooth and Misunderstandings part 1)]
“Raymond Carver also identifies tension as a key element, but for him it comes from, ‘ a sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion.’” (60)
“For Aristotle successful plots have a beginning, which introduces conflict, a middle section which develops it, and an ending which resolves it.” (61)
“It is better to focus on small disagreements, and let them be keenly felt, than to snatch at a huge issue and fail to develop it.” (61) [Both of these quotes from page 61 were very hard for me when writing Misunderstandings. I had a lot of small things I wanted to say and felt that focusing on just one would stretch it into flimsyness, thus I decided to tell a series of shorts. However, I still waver over if they are over or underdeveloped.]
“…you need not end with a spelt out statement, as long as you signal ‘a tangible change of some sort; a distinct shift in consciousness, a deepening of insight.’…either way, make sure a change or realization takes place, because without it there can be no story.” (62) [I constantly strive for this- I know I read a quotations in one of the readings, perhaps it was How to Write a Novel, that quoted an author as saying ‘figure out what you want to say then do your best not to say it’ (I paraphrase). This has been a sort of mantra over the past few weeks.]
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Mair's CMA Response
This short story was written at the Columbus Museum of Art based upon the piece “Turtle & Boy” by Jack Lessinger, 1949.
written by Mair Culbreth
Stephanie
It was this day. This moment. It really could have been any other day. But it wasn’t.
The cotton balls-in-my-ear sound of raindrops against the widnow, sliding down the glass. Telephone wires reaching from me to something out there engenders a grid to mark a place and space. This window, this house creates a boundary, a separation- much like the cell membrane selects what can enter or depart but only through a complex chemical code. We, Dog and I watch for you, listen for your laughter, your sunlight. We long to reconnect to the smell of the wet molecules of rain in the air, feel the realness of it and on us. Shhhh....I can almost hear the whisper of the wind--soft like the echo of the way I used to grin-the hint of a smeile that left with you that day. I remember it, do you?
It was the 8th anniversary of the day I was born-the day I joined your world and it was the 1st anniversary of many of the day you left me. The beginning of the trickle of birthday cards, that I longed for but to open them was to the close another window, another door, another place to feel something for you. Mailed birthday cards only mark absence. Instead, I build and create homes for other people now...the framework to the hold the security, the hope, the belief that everything is ok.
Waiting at this window for the you that won’t return. The place where the roof line of the house across the street dissoves into the sky, blurring the boundary between the two. If I flutter my eyelashes together, the telephone pole rises through the house. The telephone wires swing into and with the tree leaves as they connect to my house. Connecting us to the world. The wood of the window frame seals itself into and becoming an extenstion of the glass. The glass which lets me see, but not feel the world beyond me. This marks the day I stopped looking out for something I could not see or feel anymore. I remember the day, do you?
I build in nooks and secret places though as I tear down others people’s walls to build them back up. I collect the treasured secrets that have been hidden and tucked into the cracks and crevices--covered by plaster, wallpaper and paint. All of my collections live in my home, anchoring me to this place. To re-create all that you took with you. I remember the day, do you? I build and paint through grids that position myself and the world I am in. I paint beds and flowers and houses. I actually have my own dog now, his name is Turtle.
When I remember the handful of good things, I call you mom. For everything else, you are just Stephanie.
written by Mair Culbreth
Stephanie
It was this day. This moment. It really could have been any other day. But it wasn’t.
The cotton balls-in-my-ear sound of raindrops against the widnow, sliding down the glass. Telephone wires reaching from me to something out there engenders a grid to mark a place and space. This window, this house creates a boundary, a separation- much like the cell membrane selects what can enter or depart but only through a complex chemical code. We, Dog and I watch for you, listen for your laughter, your sunlight. We long to reconnect to the smell of the wet molecules of rain in the air, feel the realness of it and on us. Shhhh....I can almost hear the whisper of the wind--soft like the echo of the way I used to grin-the hint of a smeile that left with you that day. I remember it, do you?
It was the 8th anniversary of the day I was born-the day I joined your world and it was the 1st anniversary of many of the day you left me. The beginning of the trickle of birthday cards, that I longed for but to open them was to the close another window, another door, another place to feel something for you. Mailed birthday cards only mark absence. Instead, I build and create homes for other people now...the framework to the hold the security, the hope, the belief that everything is ok.
Waiting at this window for the you that won’t return. The place where the roof line of the house across the street dissoves into the sky, blurring the boundary between the two. If I flutter my eyelashes together, the telephone pole rises through the house. The telephone wires swing into and with the tree leaves as they connect to my house. Connecting us to the world. The wood of the window frame seals itself into and becoming an extenstion of the glass. The glass which lets me see, but not feel the world beyond me. This marks the day I stopped looking out for something I could not see or feel anymore. I remember the day, do you?
I build in nooks and secret places though as I tear down others people’s walls to build them back up. I collect the treasured secrets that have been hidden and tucked into the cracks and crevices--covered by plaster, wallpaper and paint. All of my collections live in my home, anchoring me to this place. To re-create all that you took with you. I remember the day, do you? I build and paint through grids that position myself and the world I am in. I paint beds and flowers and houses. I actually have my own dog now, his name is Turtle.
When I remember the handful of good things, I call you mom. For everything else, you are just Stephanie.
Mair's Friday Presentation
Train 80: The Carolinian
(train through my heart)
We don’t take the time to find the right words. I never had the time to find the right words. I took the train and I took the time.
Train #80: The Carolinian. This Amtrak train services stations from Charlotte, North Carolina to New York City. I picked it up in Greensboro, North Carolina after dad drove me 3 hours to get there. It was one of those places. Where there is a desolate gravel parking lot with a smattering of vehicles (although it is unclear if the are actually functioning or not). A structure or shack that could function for multiple purposes (not because it is glorious and modern and a well-designed multi-use space but because it is a box, with a door and a dusty window that suggests something can happen at some point, although due to its seeming abandonment, it is unclear, like the vehicles in the parking lot if it is still used for anything at all). The steps up to the structure and then and a slight incline leading to a plank to nowhere (of course, this is where the train theoretically pulls up, positioning one at the correct height to board). With a slight breeze that is as hot or maybe even hotter than the air temperature, my dad and I stand at the railing, talking slowly and softly.
The train stations I will visit along the way are Burlington, Durham, Cary, Raleigh, Selma, Wilson and Rocky Mount. After crossing the state line into Virginia we will stop at the Petersburg station before arriving in Richmond my final destination, approximately 5 hours and 25 minutes, plenty of time to think, write and basically figure out my life.
On the train to Richmond. I thought I might finally lose my shit either due to dad’s help or in spite of dad’s help. I wish I had found the words to tell Nicole I needed her. Needed her to be here for me, to be with me and so now anything that is difficult is sad. I just get mad and upset that she didn’t come with me.
Maybe, just maybe, traveling through the countryside of the South on an Amtrak, I will find those words. Find the places in my heart, where the tracks run through but there is nothing else….no one else ventures there and I haven’t in a long long time. Dad says the trains run through the places that people don’t go, the places time has forgotten….the junkyards, the poor parts, the backwoods, where there are no roads. The train through my heart.
It was only 3 days ago that Dad drove 8 hours to Richmond to pick me up to return to HorseShoe. Nicole had to work and I said I would be fine to go to the funeral by myself. I had not been back to the place I used to call home since so much about me seemed to have changed. Traveling back to the place that made me. The place I left as soon as I could. I went straight to 169 Kimzey. Jack and Grammary’s. I knew I was older now because the first thing I said to Pam and Allen’s kids “you’ve grown up, I hardly recognize you!” This, of course, is the one thing older people always say to kids. Funny to catch yourself saying something that makes you aware of yourself in a much different way. Right, I am older too.
At Grammary’s funeral, they repeated the words from Jacque and Kim’s wedding, “The world is too dangerous a place to not have love.” Grammary didn’t attend her daughter Jacque’s wedding to a woman and died less than a year later. Like all things southern, we let peculiarities exist but we don’t name them. Grammary and PapaJack went to Jacque and Kim’s house every Sunday evening for dinner though.
Standing outside at Mills River Methodist Church in HorseShoe, North Carolina, a mile from where I grew up, I listened to the buzz of the mid-morning bugs, working hard before it got too hot to do anything. Already under the hot sun, the weight of the heat stood as heavy as the tension between my mother and me. We were still barely speaking.
After the funeral, we returned to the house on Kimzey Road and the instruments came out. I had forgotten that part but quickly slipped back into the sensations of myself many years ago-the surround sound I knew in that cove was being in the midst of every musical instrument possible. I could never quite put my finger on where that part of me came from because I was only looking at my “biological” family for those cues. But my mountain loves: canned food, fish ponds, streams, bluegrass, gospel, sitting around the living room with sports on the tv, meals together at the table….that was all from my Combs family. The family we spent every holiday with, more than ever spent with my biological grandmother, aunts and uncles. I had my first crush (Reese), my first prom dress (Grammary sewed it from a Vogue pattern out of magenta sequins), my first babysitting job (the babies I saw earlier and did the “my how you’ve grown” cliche), my first concert (Pam took me to the Damn Yankees/Bad Company show), my first real political discussions (with Jack; the beginning of this fiery radical activist), my first grandmother who always fed me and sent me off jars of pickles, beans, applesauce, preserves, a bag of at lease 10 amish friendship muffins and several pairs of Jack’s retired Levi’s (my favorite fashion statement at the time). Grammary, the one who took care of me on sick days…making mac and cheese and soup. We lived right beside them, in a little red house on a hill with a trail through the trees between the two.
As I sat there that night, the music filling up the empty space of Grammary with Jacque’s voice-I felt it all inside of me again and I couldn’t stop smiling….Amazing Grace, I’ll Fly Away, Will the Circle Be Unbroken. Reese, on the upright bass introducing The Combs Family Band. Grammary would have been on the piano singing baritone, and there were tears as they decided who would sit in for her tonight.
Where did I go this summer? I went back. Back into myself, into the hollow of the mountain, the cove in the hills, the branch in the stream, the depths of who i was. Still part of who I am.
This past weekend I sunk into the depths
The places I don’t let myself go
The places I am afraid to go
The places I fight so hard not to go
And I got so far removed from Nicole, able to see her and hear her but not being able to reach through all of the shit building up around me. And for the first time in my life, we were able to find Each Other again. Not through the words of time but through our bodies. Slowly and softly. I felt the train running through the tracks where no one goes and we danced to the sound of the train whistle. We dance back to Each Other
Through Each Other
Against Each Other
With each movement, feeling the train moving steadily through, feeling walls dissolve, inching a little closer to each other. Until the Each and the Other were indistinguishable.
Train Part 2: Between a Swamp and Cornfield
So, I am over an hour past my time due into Richmond and I am sitting in the Selma North Carolina train station. With the one and only worker sitting in a wheelchair watching a fuzzy television, she seemed unconcerned with the fact that instead of the usual few passengers that come through this station, there were now over 100 sweaty, worked up stranded people.
At 12:15 (it is now 3:15) the train broke down.
My dad’s last words before I got on the train were, “It is better to be on a broken down train than a broken down airplane”. It didn’t occur to me that he was predicting the next 10 hours of my life.
We sat on the broken down train somewhere in between “heat and mo’ heat” (as quoted from the self-professed Sunday school teacher in the seat in front of me)
Or as someone else put it “between a swamp and cornfield”. Both descriptions of our location and situation were quite precise. Many of the passengers were heading to DC and felt we were much safer on the completely closed up, no air-at-all tin can of a train than “out in the wild”. One woman started hollering there was a big field rat out the window, coming to get us (it turned out to be a groundhog). Another woman was for Viktor Newman to fly his plane in to pick us up (he turned out to be the lead in the soap opera the young and the restless).
**Speaking of tin cans, I am reminded of my stepfather’s multiplicitous, recycling use of Miller Lite cans. He has a dog training method that involves saving the empty beer cans, filling them with pennies and shaking them in an intimidating manner at the five house dogs to hush them or get them to calm down. The dogs, being the persistent and smart animals they are, were frustrating him to no end by escaping from the chicken wire fenced-in backyard. Nicole offered to help him re-build this fence, but Charlie declined. Instead, he created what I have termed “the redneck electric fence” which consists of a series of strung together Miller lite cans filled with pennies running the entire border of their property.
With a heat index of 100 degrees, sitting in a train with no power on a single set of tracks in the middle of nowhere, north Carolina for over 2 hours, the lack of oxygen combined with the heat began to make me believe that I had imagined a life in San Francisco and that really I had just been here all the time, living this life between a swamp and a cornfield and that maybe it wasn’t so bad.
Unfortunately, my dad was channeling his psychic ability that day because his other insightful words prior to getting on the train became the next fulfilled prophecy.
After the 2 hour wait for a rescue (this IS 2005, not 1935), a diesel train came to pusll us into Selma, NC where there would be buses to pick us up.
My dad’s words 8 hours earlier about trains: “Now, Mair, the Amtrak train is NOTHING like a greyhound. The train is much nicer than a bus”.
I will point out here to discuss the South’s very complicated and layered use of the word “nice”. (It is much like the word “fine”). And can mean anything from actually what most think of as “nice” to the nice that suggests much to the contrary.
So, I am in Selma at 3:30pm with buses to arrive in “7-8 minutes”. The Red Cross Of Selma came to assist with cold drinks, stale crackers and beef jerky that won’t expire in my lifetime.
**Again I am reminded of my very far away, California organic lifestyle. Staying at my mom’s house, I made salads everyday. There was an unlabeled jar where we traditionally kept bulk olive oil with the liquor pour top that was routinely refilled. On my third day of salad eating, I inquired about the contents. It tasted slightly unusual, not quite the olive oil flavor I expected. Charlie spoke up in between bites of his two ground beef burgers and microwaved vegetables admitting to a switch up. A break from our understood use of this particular bottle. He wanted to deep fry some corncakes the other night. So, he drained the oil from the turkey fryer and funneled it into the olive oil jar because of its liquor pour top function. This oil I had been using for 3 days on my $10 organic salads had deepfried 2 Thanksgiving turkeys and 3 pork tenderloins....6 months ago.
“The busses are here!!” The crowd swell broke me from my heat delirious reminiscing of my family dynamics.
We herded ourselves, slow and sweating onto a suspiciously hot bus, preparing for our departure from the home of Vick’s Vapo-Rub, Selma NC. One passenger suggests that because the bus isn’t moving yet, the air condition can’t work properly (you know, similar to that feeling on the runway in a plane where only the jet fuel fumes are coming in through the air system while the pilot is gunning the engines to make the air flow?) As we pulled out of the train station on a greyhound bus, everyone cheered! The sun was beginning its painfully slow descent, resisting the horizon’s take over.
In the thick air still holding the reverberations of the cheers and exhausted excitement, barreling up I-95 in the bus (the bus that saved us from the train) it was quickly determined that the air condition was indeed broken (might I remind you that safety regulations require that bus windows cannot be opened). This was not unlike the tin-can of a train with non-opening windows I had been rescued from several hours ago. The train was actually cooler. We are all soaking wet, suffocating and the guy in the back with a heart condition is freaking out. People are going nuts yelling at the driver. I think a riot might ensue.
Bus driver makes a U-turn and we are back at the Selma Train station. The long swing of the bus turning around is the force needed for the tears to come out (it has taken this long). Why has she not gotten in the truck to pick me up?? Is it because I keep telling her not to? I think I have deployed the word “fine” more than once.
Black Mountain, North Carolina to Richmond Virginia: 15 hours and 31 minutes. I could have been in central Florida right now. Or Kentucky, or New York City, or 15 hours and 31 minutes closer to San Francisco
Part 3: Broken
46 hours before I leave (on an airplane).
To go back to San Francisco
To leave Virginia
To leave the south
To leave my girl my home my world
As it exists now.
It shifted somewhere in there, pretty early on, became who I was where I was what I was. I don’t even think of this as “going back” because “back” assumes things are the same as when I left and they aren’t.
(train through my heart)
We don’t take the time to find the right words. I never had the time to find the right words. I took the train and I took the time.
Train #80: The Carolinian. This Amtrak train services stations from Charlotte, North Carolina to New York City. I picked it up in Greensboro, North Carolina after dad drove me 3 hours to get there. It was one of those places. Where there is a desolate gravel parking lot with a smattering of vehicles (although it is unclear if the are actually functioning or not). A structure or shack that could function for multiple purposes (not because it is glorious and modern and a well-designed multi-use space but because it is a box, with a door and a dusty window that suggests something can happen at some point, although due to its seeming abandonment, it is unclear, like the vehicles in the parking lot if it is still used for anything at all). The steps up to the structure and then and a slight incline leading to a plank to nowhere (of course, this is where the train theoretically pulls up, positioning one at the correct height to board). With a slight breeze that is as hot or maybe even hotter than the air temperature, my dad and I stand at the railing, talking slowly and softly.
The train stations I will visit along the way are Burlington, Durham, Cary, Raleigh, Selma, Wilson and Rocky Mount. After crossing the state line into Virginia we will stop at the Petersburg station before arriving in Richmond my final destination, approximately 5 hours and 25 minutes, plenty of time to think, write and basically figure out my life.
On the train to Richmond. I thought I might finally lose my shit either due to dad’s help or in spite of dad’s help. I wish I had found the words to tell Nicole I needed her. Needed her to be here for me, to be with me and so now anything that is difficult is sad. I just get mad and upset that she didn’t come with me.
Maybe, just maybe, traveling through the countryside of the South on an Amtrak, I will find those words. Find the places in my heart, where the tracks run through but there is nothing else….no one else ventures there and I haven’t in a long long time. Dad says the trains run through the places that people don’t go, the places time has forgotten….the junkyards, the poor parts, the backwoods, where there are no roads. The train through my heart.
It was only 3 days ago that Dad drove 8 hours to Richmond to pick me up to return to HorseShoe. Nicole had to work and I said I would be fine to go to the funeral by myself. I had not been back to the place I used to call home since so much about me seemed to have changed. Traveling back to the place that made me. The place I left as soon as I could. I went straight to 169 Kimzey. Jack and Grammary’s. I knew I was older now because the first thing I said to Pam and Allen’s kids “you’ve grown up, I hardly recognize you!” This, of course, is the one thing older people always say to kids. Funny to catch yourself saying something that makes you aware of yourself in a much different way. Right, I am older too.
At Grammary’s funeral, they repeated the words from Jacque and Kim’s wedding, “The world is too dangerous a place to not have love.” Grammary didn’t attend her daughter Jacque’s wedding to a woman and died less than a year later. Like all things southern, we let peculiarities exist but we don’t name them. Grammary and PapaJack went to Jacque and Kim’s house every Sunday evening for dinner though.
Standing outside at Mills River Methodist Church in HorseShoe, North Carolina, a mile from where I grew up, I listened to the buzz of the mid-morning bugs, working hard before it got too hot to do anything. Already under the hot sun, the weight of the heat stood as heavy as the tension between my mother and me. We were still barely speaking.
After the funeral, we returned to the house on Kimzey Road and the instruments came out. I had forgotten that part but quickly slipped back into the sensations of myself many years ago-the surround sound I knew in that cove was being in the midst of every musical instrument possible. I could never quite put my finger on where that part of me came from because I was only looking at my “biological” family for those cues. But my mountain loves: canned food, fish ponds, streams, bluegrass, gospel, sitting around the living room with sports on the tv, meals together at the table….that was all from my Combs family. The family we spent every holiday with, more than ever spent with my biological grandmother, aunts and uncles. I had my first crush (Reese), my first prom dress (Grammary sewed it from a Vogue pattern out of magenta sequins), my first babysitting job (the babies I saw earlier and did the “my how you’ve grown” cliche), my first concert (Pam took me to the Damn Yankees/Bad Company show), my first real political discussions (with Jack; the beginning of this fiery radical activist), my first grandmother who always fed me and sent me off jars of pickles, beans, applesauce, preserves, a bag of at lease 10 amish friendship muffins and several pairs of Jack’s retired Levi’s (my favorite fashion statement at the time). Grammary, the one who took care of me on sick days…making mac and cheese and soup. We lived right beside them, in a little red house on a hill with a trail through the trees between the two.
As I sat there that night, the music filling up the empty space of Grammary with Jacque’s voice-I felt it all inside of me again and I couldn’t stop smiling….Amazing Grace, I’ll Fly Away, Will the Circle Be Unbroken. Reese, on the upright bass introducing The Combs Family Band. Grammary would have been on the piano singing baritone, and there were tears as they decided who would sit in for her tonight.
Where did I go this summer? I went back. Back into myself, into the hollow of the mountain, the cove in the hills, the branch in the stream, the depths of who i was. Still part of who I am.
This past weekend I sunk into the depths
The places I don’t let myself go
The places I am afraid to go
The places I fight so hard not to go
And I got so far removed from Nicole, able to see her and hear her but not being able to reach through all of the shit building up around me. And for the first time in my life, we were able to find Each Other again. Not through the words of time but through our bodies. Slowly and softly. I felt the train running through the tracks where no one goes and we danced to the sound of the train whistle. We dance back to Each Other
Through Each Other
Against Each Other
With each movement, feeling the train moving steadily through, feeling walls dissolve, inching a little closer to each other. Until the Each and the Other were indistinguishable.
Train Part 2: Between a Swamp and Cornfield
So, I am over an hour past my time due into Richmond and I am sitting in the Selma North Carolina train station. With the one and only worker sitting in a wheelchair watching a fuzzy television, she seemed unconcerned with the fact that instead of the usual few passengers that come through this station, there were now over 100 sweaty, worked up stranded people.
At 12:15 (it is now 3:15) the train broke down.
My dad’s last words before I got on the train were, “It is better to be on a broken down train than a broken down airplane”. It didn’t occur to me that he was predicting the next 10 hours of my life.
We sat on the broken down train somewhere in between “heat and mo’ heat” (as quoted from the self-professed Sunday school teacher in the seat in front of me)
Or as someone else put it “between a swamp and cornfield”. Both descriptions of our location and situation were quite precise. Many of the passengers were heading to DC and felt we were much safer on the completely closed up, no air-at-all tin can of a train than “out in the wild”. One woman started hollering there was a big field rat out the window, coming to get us (it turned out to be a groundhog). Another woman was for Viktor Newman to fly his plane in to pick us up (he turned out to be the lead in the soap opera the young and the restless).
**Speaking of tin cans, I am reminded of my stepfather’s multiplicitous, recycling use of Miller Lite cans. He has a dog training method that involves saving the empty beer cans, filling them with pennies and shaking them in an intimidating manner at the five house dogs to hush them or get them to calm down. The dogs, being the persistent and smart animals they are, were frustrating him to no end by escaping from the chicken wire fenced-in backyard. Nicole offered to help him re-build this fence, but Charlie declined. Instead, he created what I have termed “the redneck electric fence” which consists of a series of strung together Miller lite cans filled with pennies running the entire border of their property.
With a heat index of 100 degrees, sitting in a train with no power on a single set of tracks in the middle of nowhere, north Carolina for over 2 hours, the lack of oxygen combined with the heat began to make me believe that I had imagined a life in San Francisco and that really I had just been here all the time, living this life between a swamp and a cornfield and that maybe it wasn’t so bad.
Unfortunately, my dad was channeling his psychic ability that day because his other insightful words prior to getting on the train became the next fulfilled prophecy.
After the 2 hour wait for a rescue (this IS 2005, not 1935), a diesel train came to pusll us into Selma, NC where there would be buses to pick us up.
My dad’s words 8 hours earlier about trains: “Now, Mair, the Amtrak train is NOTHING like a greyhound. The train is much nicer than a bus”.
I will point out here to discuss the South’s very complicated and layered use of the word “nice”. (It is much like the word “fine”). And can mean anything from actually what most think of as “nice” to the nice that suggests much to the contrary.
So, I am in Selma at 3:30pm with buses to arrive in “7-8 minutes”. The Red Cross Of Selma came to assist with cold drinks, stale crackers and beef jerky that won’t expire in my lifetime.
**Again I am reminded of my very far away, California organic lifestyle. Staying at my mom’s house, I made salads everyday. There was an unlabeled jar where we traditionally kept bulk olive oil with the liquor pour top that was routinely refilled. On my third day of salad eating, I inquired about the contents. It tasted slightly unusual, not quite the olive oil flavor I expected. Charlie spoke up in between bites of his two ground beef burgers and microwaved vegetables admitting to a switch up. A break from our understood use of this particular bottle. He wanted to deep fry some corncakes the other night. So, he drained the oil from the turkey fryer and funneled it into the olive oil jar because of its liquor pour top function. This oil I had been using for 3 days on my $10 organic salads had deepfried 2 Thanksgiving turkeys and 3 pork tenderloins....6 months ago.
“The busses are here!!” The crowd swell broke me from my heat delirious reminiscing of my family dynamics.
We herded ourselves, slow and sweating onto a suspiciously hot bus, preparing for our departure from the home of Vick’s Vapo-Rub, Selma NC. One passenger suggests that because the bus isn’t moving yet, the air condition can’t work properly (you know, similar to that feeling on the runway in a plane where only the jet fuel fumes are coming in through the air system while the pilot is gunning the engines to make the air flow?) As we pulled out of the train station on a greyhound bus, everyone cheered! The sun was beginning its painfully slow descent, resisting the horizon’s take over.
In the thick air still holding the reverberations of the cheers and exhausted excitement, barreling up I-95 in the bus (the bus that saved us from the train) it was quickly determined that the air condition was indeed broken (might I remind you that safety regulations require that bus windows cannot be opened). This was not unlike the tin-can of a train with non-opening windows I had been rescued from several hours ago. The train was actually cooler. We are all soaking wet, suffocating and the guy in the back with a heart condition is freaking out. People are going nuts yelling at the driver. I think a riot might ensue.
Bus driver makes a U-turn and we are back at the Selma Train station. The long swing of the bus turning around is the force needed for the tears to come out (it has taken this long). Why has she not gotten in the truck to pick me up?? Is it because I keep telling her not to? I think I have deployed the word “fine” more than once.
Black Mountain, North Carolina to Richmond Virginia: 15 hours and 31 minutes. I could have been in central Florida right now. Or Kentucky, or New York City, or 15 hours and 31 minutes closer to San Francisco
Part 3: Broken
46 hours before I leave (on an airplane).
To go back to San Francisco
To leave Virginia
To leave the south
To leave my girl my home my world
As it exists now.
It shifted somewhere in there, pretty early on, became who I was where I was what I was. I don’t even think of this as “going back” because “back” assumes things are the same as when I left and they aren’t.
Mair's Poem From Bradford Exhibit
You.
Push through the boarded up, collected memories.
I.
Cover the remnants of remnants of brittle remains.
Dangle in out of reach places.
Flaking off in unexpected breaths.
You.
Crash into places no one goes anymore. Without the foot traffic, I am forgotten.
Fragments that disappear into days
The word, the letter. the picture. the recipe. the suggestion of soemthing shouting quietly.
I have hunkered down, down into the bedrock of a history, anchored to this restless place.
Water stains leave your residue-Do you hear me??
My head tilts to take you in.
I. Collect the bits and pieces scattered on the ground
And cover up what was left behind.
Push through the boarded up, collected memories.
I.
Cover the remnants of remnants of brittle remains.
Dangle in out of reach places.
Flaking off in unexpected breaths.
You.
Crash into places no one goes anymore. Without the foot traffic, I am forgotten.
Fragments that disappear into days
The word, the letter. the picture. the recipe. the suggestion of soemthing shouting quietly.
I have hunkered down, down into the bedrock of a history, anchored to this restless place.
Water stains leave your residue-Do you hear me??
My head tilts to take you in.
I. Collect the bits and pieces scattered on the ground
And cover up what was left behind.
Mair's 100 Word Bio
Mom said I was here, Dad said not yet. Mom said “She is here!” Dad lifts the sheet and yelled “Damn, get the nurse!” They don’t see the world the same. Mom rolls her eyes as she tells this each year. Mom is a nurse. Dad works with minds. HIs mom taught dance. His dad drank. Her mom said much. Her dad just smiled. We moved and we moved more. At least once a year. I dance. I ride bikes. I say things they said no to. Don’t know who I think I am.
Think back....
Think back....
Mair's Reading Responses
1. Freeman, Mark. Chapter 5: Autobiographical Understanding and Narrative Inquiry.
Freeman sets out to deliver an historical understanding of the origination and development of autobiographical narratives and then consider how the work of narrative inquiry may ultimately provide a more comprehensive and integrated understanding of the “human realm”. He deploys autobiographical narrative as a way to decrease the dichotomy of science and art, a methodology that may perhaps illuminate what is missing in the separation. Situating his subjectivity and lens as trained toward the Western, more individualistic, male-dominated understanding of “self”, he works from Gusdorf’s essay “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography”. The representation of self through memory and personal viewpoint not only provides insight on an individual level but allows for a perspective on the culture of society.
“Precisely because there cannot be a full disentangling of ‘I’ and ‘me’ of subject and object, the resultant story is bound to be permeated by one’s own irrevocably personal view” (128)
Quote by Weintraub: “The essential subject matter of all autobiographic writing is concretely experienced reality…”
~I am interested in the overlaps of dance choreography as a story of self and the tools utilized in autobiographical narrative
“there is a search for ‘unity’, the resultant product being an expression of the innermost dimensions of self. The idea and ideal of authenticity loom large”
“For men, personal agency is emphasized. For women, on the other hand, there emerges a tradition of writing that ‘conceals agency, concentrating on inner life, but leaving them largely ‘disembodied’ (Conway) (131)
-Focus on interiorization of life
From modern to post-modern..Gusdorf’s idea that the “second reading of the experience” is “truer than the first because it adds to experience itself consciousness of it
Narrative confers a meaning on the event: “postulating of a meaning dictates the choice of the facts to be retained and of the details to bring out” (133) Gusdorf
~by understanding how we make meaning, what we choose to remember or what point of view we take, it is then possible to make transparent our subjectivity in all that we do. This is of particular interest to me coming full circle trying to understand the world from a creative place, to engineering and the scientific-quantitative-objective realm to qualitative and ‘experimental methods’.
“Perhaps the aim of the autobiographer or memorist is simply to write, as interestingly and artfully as possible. This would not only spare the (illusory) burden of somehow discovering and disclosing the (real, authentic) self; it would allow for the possibility of creating, through writing, a new self all together.” (134)
2. Check, Ed. “My Working-Class Roots in an Academic War Zone: Creating Space to Grieve and Honor”. Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, Vol 24, 2006, 23-35
Check uses autobiographical inquiry through the lens of standpoint theory in order to situate his cultural experiences and his personal artwork in academe. Given the marginalization of his working class status and queerness, he is interested in interrogating the marginalization of his academic and activist work by demonstrating his way of knowing the world and specifically how this informs his art, research and teaching.
I appreciate this article as it resonates with the nature of research and art activism I am engaging in. In addition to the critical engagement with issues in academe, he also touches on issues related to the dichotomized relationship of practice and theory, something I bump up against regularly. By integrating them in his work with a layered approached, he brings to the forefront the entangled and inseparable relationship and subsequent knowledge production that comes from the engagement.
“I demonstrate how first-person narrative, truth-telling is essential for respectful learning and social justice” (33)
“She demonstrates how we as teachers can facilitate complex and changing identities of students in relation to genders, sexualities, and social class positions” (32)
“My pedagogy in art is simple: Take care of students’ physical and emotional needs and the intellectual needs will take care of themselves” (31-2)
3. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Shape Structures Story: Fresh and Feisty Stories about Disability” Narrative, Vol.15, No1 2007
“How can we maintain a continuous sense of self as our bodies change over time?” (113)
Between time and human materiality...
I will begin discussing this article from the perspective of my work. This article was pivotal in providing me with a way to frame identity and the body and the changes that contribute to one’s different understanding of self. Identity is now understood to be shifting and multiplicitous but the relationship to the embodiment and changes in embodiment is a key element to my research but I had been unable to articulate it in such a clear way as did Garland-Thomson.
“The configuration and function of our human body determines our narrative identity, the sense of who we are to ourselves and others” (113)
Bynum “Shape or body is crucial, not incidental, to story. It carries a story; it makes a story visible; in a sense it is story. Shape (or visible body) is in space what is in time....Identity is finally shape carrying story.”
What is particularly of interest to my research is the idea of transition, as the body changes our understanding of the world and interactions with people change. This can be sudden or it can be over time. Garland-Thomson goes on to suggest that a “cultural fantasy” we carry is the predictability and stability of the body (114). One of the aspects of training and working as a body educator is my understanding of constantly shifting awareness that occurs in actively listening to the body, an awareness that confirms the constant shifts and changes. Taking her discussion on the normative approach of story structuring shape, we can see the ways in which the standardized body has led to much difficulty and health problems. Based on media and current beliefs about the body, we can see how the concept deviation creates discord, particularly among women. Deviation then, is seen to be an anomaly when it is actually the norm. “Thus, we use the cultural story that we call normalcy to structure our shapes.”
4. Tierney, William G. “Get Real: Representing Reality”
Tierney presents an argument for narrative methodologies that “explicitly locates the author in the text”. By employing these strategies, social scientists may open up the way we portray the live of participants in research (385). However, Tierney warns that researchers and grad stents are not adequately prepared to engage in creative writing with any skill since we are primarily trained to write abstracts and scientific methods: “how to write dissertations and research articles” (390). As an educator, he teaches his students how to critically approach and understands various methodologies in texts..how the author positions herself reflexively.
This article resonates with my experience trying to author an autoethnography as a social scientist and the lack of preparation I had received. My creative training as an artist gave me quite a bit of skill and understanding. At this point in my writing career, Tierney’s article provides great insight into the integration of art and academics in research methods.
“concerns with three central elements of these methods: the nature of writing, the readers of a text, and the purpose of the research act” (389)
Here Tierney sums up critical issues in my creative choreographic process as well as my research process.
“Just as I was once concerned with the unreflexive absence of the author from the narrative, I am equally concerned with the unreflexive insertion of the author into the narrative” (391)
The concern of “a movement away from trying to understand the world of the ‘other’ and toward a more cathartic psychological agency of the self” (392).......this is well stated as one of the major critiques in the interpretive methods.
“If we are to embrace experimental writing then the narrative voice needs to break the stranglehold that linear temporality currently has on our way of constructing reality” (396)….here, a good example of art education and creative training rationale.
“A focus on the author’s voice enables individuals to see how they think of their connections to the Other” (396)
5. Ely, Margot. “In-Forming Re-Presentations”, Chapter 22
Ely examines forms and styles of writing and discusses “their functions in final narrative research reports” (568). After discussing the layered meaning of the word “representation”, she provides examples leading to the understanding of “persona” in texts. Presentation becomes not only a signature but gives meaning to the work. Here, as in dance, I understand my work to be all that is there…the frame and form provide meaning in often subtle, subversive ways. Our presence as people on stage is not overridden by “performance” and must be considered. With some training in visual design, I have always considered the information architecture and visual communication within my decision making as an artist. This article is especially helpful (and I will likely cite it in my future work) as foundation for understanding the architecture of writing and articles.
6. Eisenhauer, Jennifer. “Writing Dora: Creating Community through Autobiographical Zines about Mental Illness”
Eisenhauer examines Zine writing as a form of community for mental illness and also uses the space of the academic research article to convey her personal narrative experience with mental illness. By focusing on the political implications of community building through writing, Eisenhauer highlights the silencing experienced with mental illness through the “construction of discursive space through which to challenge dominant cultural narratives” (3) .
This becomes “a critical practice at the intersection of consumption and production of popular culture” (2).
“They are told through a wounded body.”
Arthur Frank: “The body sets in motion the need for new stories when its disease disrupts the old stories. The body, whether still diseased of recovered, is simultaneously cause, topic, and instrument of what the new stories are.”
“Cultural re-marking of the body and a form of healing as cultural critique” (8)
“Reproduce popular media and through that repetition interrogate the mechanisms of stigma from within dominant popular discourses” (8)
“Words become something that can unsettle objectification rather than reinforce it” (9)
**”When understood through theoretical frames and feminist third spaces, the blurring of consumer/producer boundaries become central to our understanding of zines as a practice and culture” (12)
Amazing article….interrogating dominant narratives and drawing on her position of power as a professor and researcher in order to effect change.
7. Newman, Jenny. “Redrafting and Editing”
Newman offers that “real writing is rewriting” which absolutely rings true. As a graduate student operating with many papers due at the end of a quarter, I find that I don’t allow for the time necessary to rewrite. I have found recently (and have been encouraged by professors supporting the phd path) that starting with a draft and then rewriting it for the course provides the time and energy necessary to make a strong paper.
Revising for Meaning
Most involved
Revising for character
“So many writers depend on stereotypes” (158)
Revising for pace
“Fiction writers now many methods—such as description, or the use of retrospect—of slowing the pace. …vary rhythm, by focusing for example on atmosphere or character development.” (159)
Revising for Style
Telling vs. showing (160)
Revising for Accuracy
Importance of punctuation (not unlike Ely’s form and presentation article), check facts
8. Newman, Jenny. Short Story Writing
What I appreciated most about this chapter was the overlapping techniques and forms for the choreographic work I do. I see dance pieces I make as short stories, vignettes that are expressed in the form of movement. Upon making this clear connection in this reading, I began to look at the tools Newman suggests in her chapter as possible tools for my methodology in dance making. Of course, dance can be something beyond “story” and one has to be mindful of the trite conventions in narrative dance.
V.S. Pritchett says “The novel tends to tell us everything, whereas the short story tells us only one thing, and that intensely” (53)
The short story writer has “a unique and exact way of looking at things, and on finding the right context for expressing that way of looking” (53)
Character: “those who live at odds with the so-called mainstream” (54)
Point of View: “lens through which your reader looks at the world you create”…this could be particularly interesting to consider in the context of dance…
Dialogue: relationships
Plot: obstacles…traditionally 3 in number (61) shows the antagonists power, build tension, form the story’s climax
Ending: Oates-“signal a tangible change of some sort; a distinct shift in consciousness, a deepening of insight” (62)
9.
Friel, James. “Writing a Novel”
This chapter began to sketch out for me a possible approach to my dissertation in considering narrative inquiry. While I may not use it directly, it was certainly helpful in outlining a large scale project. Additionally, I am curating-creating a program of art installation and dance at the Urban Arts Space and given the enormity of the project, I am thinking this way of approaching a project with a through line may be of great help.
The Outline
Foreshadowing
Plotting
Point of View
Beginnings (and Endings too)
Characterisation
Dialogue
Progressing
Drafting
Animating Prose
Expressing your theme: “writing a secret agenda give a prose a pulse—a hidden but very real sense of animation” (117)
“to show how people are imprisoned in relationships” (118)
The Habit of Work
Revising!!!
Freeman sets out to deliver an historical understanding of the origination and development of autobiographical narratives and then consider how the work of narrative inquiry may ultimately provide a more comprehensive and integrated understanding of the “human realm”. He deploys autobiographical narrative as a way to decrease the dichotomy of science and art, a methodology that may perhaps illuminate what is missing in the separation. Situating his subjectivity and lens as trained toward the Western, more individualistic, male-dominated understanding of “self”, he works from Gusdorf’s essay “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography”. The representation of self through memory and personal viewpoint not only provides insight on an individual level but allows for a perspective on the culture of society.
“Precisely because there cannot be a full disentangling of ‘I’ and ‘me’ of subject and object, the resultant story is bound to be permeated by one’s own irrevocably personal view” (128)
Quote by Weintraub: “The essential subject matter of all autobiographic writing is concretely experienced reality…”
~I am interested in the overlaps of dance choreography as a story of self and the tools utilized in autobiographical narrative
“there is a search for ‘unity’, the resultant product being an expression of the innermost dimensions of self. The idea and ideal of authenticity loom large”
“For men, personal agency is emphasized. For women, on the other hand, there emerges a tradition of writing that ‘conceals agency, concentrating on inner life, but leaving them largely ‘disembodied’ (Conway) (131)
-Focus on interiorization of life
From modern to post-modern..Gusdorf’s idea that the “second reading of the experience” is “truer than the first because it adds to experience itself consciousness of it
Narrative confers a meaning on the event: “postulating of a meaning dictates the choice of the facts to be retained and of the details to bring out” (133) Gusdorf
~by understanding how we make meaning, what we choose to remember or what point of view we take, it is then possible to make transparent our subjectivity in all that we do. This is of particular interest to me coming full circle trying to understand the world from a creative place, to engineering and the scientific-quantitative-objective realm to qualitative and ‘experimental methods’.
“Perhaps the aim of the autobiographer or memorist is simply to write, as interestingly and artfully as possible. This would not only spare the (illusory) burden of somehow discovering and disclosing the (real, authentic) self; it would allow for the possibility of creating, through writing, a new self all together.” (134)
2. Check, Ed. “My Working-Class Roots in an Academic War Zone: Creating Space to Grieve and Honor”. Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, Vol 24, 2006, 23-35
Check uses autobiographical inquiry through the lens of standpoint theory in order to situate his cultural experiences and his personal artwork in academe. Given the marginalization of his working class status and queerness, he is interested in interrogating the marginalization of his academic and activist work by demonstrating his way of knowing the world and specifically how this informs his art, research and teaching.
I appreciate this article as it resonates with the nature of research and art activism I am engaging in. In addition to the critical engagement with issues in academe, he also touches on issues related to the dichotomized relationship of practice and theory, something I bump up against regularly. By integrating them in his work with a layered approached, he brings to the forefront the entangled and inseparable relationship and subsequent knowledge production that comes from the engagement.
“I demonstrate how first-person narrative, truth-telling is essential for respectful learning and social justice” (33)
“She demonstrates how we as teachers can facilitate complex and changing identities of students in relation to genders, sexualities, and social class positions” (32)
“My pedagogy in art is simple: Take care of students’ physical and emotional needs and the intellectual needs will take care of themselves” (31-2)
3. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Shape Structures Story: Fresh and Feisty Stories about Disability” Narrative, Vol.15, No1 2007
“How can we maintain a continuous sense of self as our bodies change over time?” (113)
Between time and human materiality...
I will begin discussing this article from the perspective of my work. This article was pivotal in providing me with a way to frame identity and the body and the changes that contribute to one’s different understanding of self. Identity is now understood to be shifting and multiplicitous but the relationship to the embodiment and changes in embodiment is a key element to my research but I had been unable to articulate it in such a clear way as did Garland-Thomson.
“The configuration and function of our human body determines our narrative identity, the sense of who we are to ourselves and others” (113)
Bynum “Shape or body is crucial, not incidental, to story. It carries a story; it makes a story visible; in a sense it is story. Shape (or visible body) is in space what is in time....Identity is finally shape carrying story.”
What is particularly of interest to my research is the idea of transition, as the body changes our understanding of the world and interactions with people change. This can be sudden or it can be over time. Garland-Thomson goes on to suggest that a “cultural fantasy” we carry is the predictability and stability of the body (114). One of the aspects of training and working as a body educator is my understanding of constantly shifting awareness that occurs in actively listening to the body, an awareness that confirms the constant shifts and changes. Taking her discussion on the normative approach of story structuring shape, we can see the ways in which the standardized body has led to much difficulty and health problems. Based on media and current beliefs about the body, we can see how the concept deviation creates discord, particularly among women. Deviation then, is seen to be an anomaly when it is actually the norm. “Thus, we use the cultural story that we call normalcy to structure our shapes.”
4. Tierney, William G. “Get Real: Representing Reality”
Tierney presents an argument for narrative methodologies that “explicitly locates the author in the text”. By employing these strategies, social scientists may open up the way we portray the live of participants in research (385). However, Tierney warns that researchers and grad stents are not adequately prepared to engage in creative writing with any skill since we are primarily trained to write abstracts and scientific methods: “how to write dissertations and research articles” (390). As an educator, he teaches his students how to critically approach and understands various methodologies in texts..how the author positions herself reflexively.
This article resonates with my experience trying to author an autoethnography as a social scientist and the lack of preparation I had received. My creative training as an artist gave me quite a bit of skill and understanding. At this point in my writing career, Tierney’s article provides great insight into the integration of art and academics in research methods.
“concerns with three central elements of these methods: the nature of writing, the readers of a text, and the purpose of the research act” (389)
Here Tierney sums up critical issues in my creative choreographic process as well as my research process.
“Just as I was once concerned with the unreflexive absence of the author from the narrative, I am equally concerned with the unreflexive insertion of the author into the narrative” (391)
The concern of “a movement away from trying to understand the world of the ‘other’ and toward a more cathartic psychological agency of the self” (392).......this is well stated as one of the major critiques in the interpretive methods.
“If we are to embrace experimental writing then the narrative voice needs to break the stranglehold that linear temporality currently has on our way of constructing reality” (396)….here, a good example of art education and creative training rationale.
“A focus on the author’s voice enables individuals to see how they think of their connections to the Other” (396)
5. Ely, Margot. “In-Forming Re-Presentations”, Chapter 22
Ely examines forms and styles of writing and discusses “their functions in final narrative research reports” (568). After discussing the layered meaning of the word “representation”, she provides examples leading to the understanding of “persona” in texts. Presentation becomes not only a signature but gives meaning to the work. Here, as in dance, I understand my work to be all that is there…the frame and form provide meaning in often subtle, subversive ways. Our presence as people on stage is not overridden by “performance” and must be considered. With some training in visual design, I have always considered the information architecture and visual communication within my decision making as an artist. This article is especially helpful (and I will likely cite it in my future work) as foundation for understanding the architecture of writing and articles.
6. Eisenhauer, Jennifer. “Writing Dora: Creating Community through Autobiographical Zines about Mental Illness”
Eisenhauer examines Zine writing as a form of community for mental illness and also uses the space of the academic research article to convey her personal narrative experience with mental illness. By focusing on the political implications of community building through writing, Eisenhauer highlights the silencing experienced with mental illness through the “construction of discursive space through which to challenge dominant cultural narratives” (3) .
This becomes “a critical practice at the intersection of consumption and production of popular culture” (2).
“They are told through a wounded body.”
Arthur Frank: “The body sets in motion the need for new stories when its disease disrupts the old stories. The body, whether still diseased of recovered, is simultaneously cause, topic, and instrument of what the new stories are.”
“Cultural re-marking of the body and a form of healing as cultural critique” (8)
“Reproduce popular media and through that repetition interrogate the mechanisms of stigma from within dominant popular discourses” (8)
“Words become something that can unsettle objectification rather than reinforce it” (9)
**”When understood through theoretical frames and feminist third spaces, the blurring of consumer/producer boundaries become central to our understanding of zines as a practice and culture” (12)
Amazing article….interrogating dominant narratives and drawing on her position of power as a professor and researcher in order to effect change.
7. Newman, Jenny. “Redrafting and Editing”
Newman offers that “real writing is rewriting” which absolutely rings true. As a graduate student operating with many papers due at the end of a quarter, I find that I don’t allow for the time necessary to rewrite. I have found recently (and have been encouraged by professors supporting the phd path) that starting with a draft and then rewriting it for the course provides the time and energy necessary to make a strong paper.
Revising for Meaning
Most involved
Revising for character
“So many writers depend on stereotypes” (158)
Revising for pace
“Fiction writers now many methods—such as description, or the use of retrospect—of slowing the pace. …vary rhythm, by focusing for example on atmosphere or character development.” (159)
Revising for Style
Telling vs. showing (160)
Revising for Accuracy
Importance of punctuation (not unlike Ely’s form and presentation article), check facts
8. Newman, Jenny. Short Story Writing
What I appreciated most about this chapter was the overlapping techniques and forms for the choreographic work I do. I see dance pieces I make as short stories, vignettes that are expressed in the form of movement. Upon making this clear connection in this reading, I began to look at the tools Newman suggests in her chapter as possible tools for my methodology in dance making. Of course, dance can be something beyond “story” and one has to be mindful of the trite conventions in narrative dance.
V.S. Pritchett says “The novel tends to tell us everything, whereas the short story tells us only one thing, and that intensely” (53)
The short story writer has “a unique and exact way of looking at things, and on finding the right context for expressing that way of looking” (53)
Character: “those who live at odds with the so-called mainstream” (54)
Point of View: “lens through which your reader looks at the world you create”…this could be particularly interesting to consider in the context of dance…
Dialogue: relationships
Plot: obstacles…traditionally 3 in number (61) shows the antagonists power, build tension, form the story’s climax
Ending: Oates-“signal a tangible change of some sort; a distinct shift in consciousness, a deepening of insight” (62)
9.
Friel, James. “Writing a Novel”
This chapter began to sketch out for me a possible approach to my dissertation in considering narrative inquiry. While I may not use it directly, it was certainly helpful in outlining a large scale project. Additionally, I am curating-creating a program of art installation and dance at the Urban Arts Space and given the enormity of the project, I am thinking this way of approaching a project with a through line may be of great help.
The Outline
Foreshadowing
Plotting
Point of View
Beginnings (and Endings too)
Characterisation
Dialogue
Progressing
Drafting
Animating Prose
Expressing your theme: “writing a secret agenda give a prose a pulse—a hidden but very real sense of animation” (117)
“to show how people are imprisoned in relationships” (118)
The Habit of Work
Revising!!!
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