Michael Steinberg

Introductory Note: I've gotten a good deal of positive feedback to the first three parts of Karen Babine's "Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers." This is the fourth of a five installments. If you missed the first three, they appear right below this one. I'll post the fifth installment on December 16, one week from today.

Below. is my original introduction to the piece:

This month’s guest is Karen Babine, the founder and editor of the very fine, online magazine, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies assayjournal.com

Karen’s contribution, Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers, is, as its title suggests, a personal, yet very detailed and meticulously researched piece on/about using the essay to teach “place” to first-year-writers. Although it’s aimed at first-year students and freshman composition teachers, this essay, I believe, will be of great value to just about anyone--both experienced and beginners--who teach and write literary nonfiction.

For those who follow this blog, Karen’s essay is a departure of sorts. For almost four years, I’ve been posting personal/teaching essays on/about matters of genre and craft. I've written some and selected guest writer/teachers have written others. Karen’s piece, an expansive essay--a thoughtful, thought-provoking, personal/critical essay. Not only is it an informed, in-depth, study on/about the teaching of place, but it also re-visits an important conversation about teaching writing, about the relationship between creative writing (in this case, literary nonfiction) and composition, and about the writing process itself--a passionate, transformative, approach to writing that began in the 1970’s. The movement included a host of concerned practitioners, rhetoricians and theorists, and beginning teachers of composition. It thrived for almost three decades before being replaced ,in the late 80’s, by a traditional, heavily prescriptive, outdated, methodology, an approach that’s being taught today in most public schools and in many colleges and universities as well.

This essay is a reflective, complex (and a very important, I believe), piece. And so, I’ve chosen to post one segment each Wednesday for five consecutive weeks.

The fourth segment appears below.

Note: In this and in each subsequent post, I'll include the full list of citations.


FINDING THE MIDDLE VOICE: ARTICULATING DISTANCE

The struggle to articulate why their experiences or thoughts should matter to an outside audience, to people who do not know them and do not know the place they are writing about, mostly comes down to the element of exposition. This is what we felt was missing from Elizabeth Dodd’s piece, ability of the writer to navigate the distance between the self who experienced the event and the self who is writing about the event. This is the important link between valuing an experience as a writer and valuing it as a reader. Mark Tredinnick writes that “the essay depends on a world and on an author: it stretches between them, author and solid earth, speaking of, made of, both of them” (“Essential Prose” 36). He coins the term “middle voice” to speak of the space between the author and the earth—or, more broadly in this context, the student-author and his or her subject. In some languages, the grammatical middle voice refers to the third voice that bridges active and passive voice. Both are apt metaphors to discuss the analysis that exposition provides and universal quality of high exposition.

Teaching students about distance proves to be as difficult—and as simple—as teaching them that their experiences are valuable. Just as Natalie Kusz’s succinct description of nonfiction values “what you know now as a result of what happened,” teaching students that who they were when the experience happened is not the same person who is sitting down at the computer writing of the experience is a process that has proven to be easy in the conversation, but tough in the execution. My students nod in comprehension when I explain this, but the execution on the page takes practice that often spans the sixteen weeks of the semester. One student who wrote about the 2004 Hallam, NE tornado, an F-4 tornado that destroyed a wide swath near her grandparents’ house, a tornado that struck the same day her mother told her she had breast cancer, which resulted in a lovely essay about the language of cancer and tornadoes. My student, who was eleven at the time, knows a lot more now at eighteen than she did at the time, which, when that particular light bulb went on, shifted the draft from merely a journal entry about how she felt at the time into a true Essay that made these two unique events relevant to those who were not familiar with the tornado or had no experience with cancer. It is, as Mark Tredinnick writes in “The Essential Prose of Things,” “That writing self is a mosaic of many selves touched by many parts of the other she engages with; and the words she writes are made not so much by her—or even by all those many bits of her—as by the relationship between herself and the other. This is the kind of self the essayist must be” (37). The point here is that it is in this place that content and craft intersect.

In the Foreword to the 2011 volume of Best American Travel Writing, the eleventh volume in the annual series, series editor Jason Wilson fits the essay—and the necessity of the middle voice—within the framework of his own classroom: “I always encourage them to think about their youthful adventures with as much distance as possible, and to fit their personal stories into the context of the place. ‘Why are you telling me this story?’ I ask them. ‘What makes this your trip and no one else’s?’” (x). At best, place and travel writing are two sides of the same coin and in my classroom, I often do not make the distinction, offering students the greatest chance to find what it is they need to write about without labeling their work one way or another. Wilson continues:

“Perhaps the real measure of success is whether or not these students sharpen their critical eye, learning to look for the sorts of fascinating or idiosyncratic or unexpected or profound moments and experiences that make travel (and life) more meaningful. Meaningful travel…is, of course, open to all of us. Writing about travel in a way that resonates with readers? Well, that’s something else altogether (xi).”

My intention in using the essay, knowing that I will be starting from zero-knowledge in this form, is to teach students to find the exceptional in the ordinary. I want to teach them that it does not matter if they can relate to a topic: the more relevant questions are Is this piece of writing successful? If so, what makes it work? If not, what makes it unsuccessful? What can you learn from this piece of writing that you can use in your own writing? As might be expected, this process takes some time. My students are writers—even if they do not claim themselves as such, I claim them as such.

It is this articulation of the space between the literal elements of the essay as well as the elements of craft that is important and I like the term middle voice for it. Later, Tredinnick writes that “The middle-voiced writer is not separable from what she encounters—is not merely an agent of action, or even of observation. Nor is what she observes reducible to a lifeless object. Each affects and is affected by the other. And the voice we hear belongs to them both; the self of the piece of writing is a self composed of its many figures of participation with the place” (36). Given this, the middle voice acknowledges that part of the page needs to be active, part of the page needs to make sense of that action, some of the page needs to observe and contemplate. None of the elements could survive without the other. The page is as much a place as the ground my students stand on.


ARTICULATION V

During WP2, while we are discussing place and language, we read Kim Barnes’s essay “The Ashes of August,” which teaches us the language of Idaho and the language of wildfires. Even on the first page, as we get a spectacular grounding in light and color and taste (which is bookended in the last paragraph by a wonderful evocation of smell), the reader is told that “the riverbanks are bedded in basalt.” My students and I agree that it means something different to know that your bedrock is basalt. On Tim Robinson’s Aran Islands in Ireland, it means something to know that the bedrock limestone, just as when he writes of Connemara, it means something different to know the bedrock is granite. As Mark Tredinnick writes of the Blue Plateau in Australia, the knowledge of sandstone beneath your feet also tells you what you need to know about what it means to stand here, today, in this particular angle of sunshine.

It means something to know that Barnes’s canyon was formed by volcanoes, as she’s making the point with that one word that her home is a volatile place, formed by fire from its earliest days. As the essay itself is about wildfires that come every August, it means something to know that fire still forms the people who live here, and it begins to answer the question what does it mean to live here, today? What are the layers of meaning? What is our context? What is underneath our feet that affects how we live? And how do we articulate what we cannot see?

And the answer is this: this is how we are connected. A volcano twelve million years ago connects those of us who stand on the Great Plains to those who stand in Idaho and it does not matter if we stand on flat or mountain, water or clay. Because the mud that cakes our shoes at Ashfall in Nebraska can be traced directly back to a specific volcano in Idaho, to a specific moment in time, linked by science, linked by the glass shards of volcanic bubbles when they shattered.

WORKS CITED

Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park. University of Nebraska State Museum. 2011. Web. 29 Nov. 2011
Bishop, Sharon. “The Power of Place” The English Journal 93.6 (2004): 65-69. Jstor. Web. 12 September 2011.
--- “A Sense of Place” Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing. Ed. Robert E. Brooke. New York and Berkeley: Teacher’s College Press, 2003. 65-82. Print.
Bishop, Wendy. “Suddenly Sexy: Creative Nonfiction Rear-Ends Composition” College English 65.3 (2003): 257-275. Jstor. 10 June 2010.
Brooke, Robert E., ed. Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing. New York and Berkeley: Teacher’s College Press, 2003.
--- “Suburban Life and Place-Conscious Education: The Problem of Local Citizenship”
Coakley, Tom. “How to Speak of the Secret Desert Wars.” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 12.1 (2010): 95-108. Print.
Dodd, Elizabeth. “Underground.” A Year in Place. Ed. W. Scott Olsen and Bret Lott. Salt Lake City, UT: Utah UP, 2001
Gruchow, Paul. Grass Roots: The Universe of Home. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 1995.
---Boundary Waters: The Grace of the Wild. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 1997.
Gruenewald, David A. “Foundations of Place: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Place-Conscious Education.” American Educational Research Journal 40.3 (2003): 619-654. Jstor. 20 Nov. 2011.
Kitchen, Judith. “Culloden.” In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones. New York: Norton, 1996.
Lopate, Phillip. “What Happened to the Personal Essay?” Against Joie de Vivre. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2008.
Madden, Patrick. “The Infinite Suggestiveness of Common Things.” Quotidiana. Lincoln, NE: Nebraska UP, 2010. 1-10.
Morano, Michele. “In the Subjunctive Mood.” Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain. Iowa City, IA: Iowa UP, 2007. 25-38
Olsen, W. Scott. “The Love of Maps.” Weber: The Contemporary West. 14.2 (1997). Web. 29 Nov. 2011.
Robinson, Tim. Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara. Dublin, Ireland: Lilliput Press, 1995.
Root, Robert. “Naming Nonfiction (A Polyptych).” College English 65.3 (2003). Jstor. Web. 14 Nov. 2011.
---“What the Spaces Say.” Home page. Central Michigan University. Web. 29 Nov. 2011.
Smith, Alexander. “On the Writing of Essays.” Quotidiana. Ed. Patrick Madden. 27 Oct 2006. Web. 29 Nov 2011.
Stern, Jerome. Making Shapely Fiction. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.
Tredinnick, Mark. The Blue Plateau: An Australian Pastoral. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2009.
--- “The Essential Prose of Things” The Land’s Wild Music. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2005.
UNL Factbook. Office of Institutional Research and Planning. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 1 Sept. 2011. Web. 29 Nov. 2011
Wilson, Jason. Foreword. Best American Travel Writing 2011. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2011. ix-xii.

(The next segment, part 5, will run on December 16)

Bio Note:

Karen Babine is the author of the essay collection Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and the founder and editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in River Teeth, Weber Studies, Ascent, Slag Glass City, and more. She is currently English Faculty at North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park, MN.
assayjournal.com
www.karenbabine.com