Michael Steinberg

Note: This is the last installment of Karen Babine's "Articulation: On Using the Essay to Teach Place-Consciousness to First-Year Writers." If you missed the first four installments, they appear right below this one.

Here's 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 It thrived for almost three decades before being replaced ,in the late 80’s, by a traditional, heavily prescriptive, outdated, methodology, an approach that’s being taught today in most public schools and in many colleges and universities as well.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.

The FIFTH segment appears below.

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

MJS


PART FIVE: PRAXIS: USING THE ESSAY TO WRITE PLACE-CONSCIOUSNESS

The active citizenry required of place-conscious education—that it does not simply stay inside the classroom, but finds its way out of the personal into the global context—finds a different expression in a cross-curriculum unit that Sharon Bishop designed between her English class and a biology class at Heartland Community Schools (“Power of Place” 76). Though her unit is designed for her specific high school setting, the concept transfers nicely to a first-year writing classroom, one that considers the Essay an important part of teaching place-consciousness. Collaboration between departments and classes at the college level is rare and difficult. As a result, trying to get my students to understand where they are already using what they are learning in my classes in other classes is essential.

But if the best essays are taking place in the subgenres—like science—collaboration and overlap of disciplines is essential. The opportunities for such are simply greater and the possibilities more intricate at the college level, and it seems a shame not to take advantage of what is present on the UNL campus. My students largely come into my classroom thinking that each subject they have been taught in their K-12 education must remain separate. Combine science and history? For them, it’s unthinkable—but tell that to Stephen Jay Gould. Literature and biology? Absolutely not—so we might as well toss the Annie Dillard. What about UNL’s own John Janovy, Jr., of the biology department, who has published fifteen books, ten of which are creative nonfiction about the Plains? If students learn that writing is only confined to English classes—and if in those English classes there’s a certain definition of what you can write about that teaches students that the place they come from, that the thoughts they have aren’t going to be interesting to anyone else, that’s hugely problematic. But it is also a wonderful opportunity that the Essay can fill.

The point is to teach students different ways to envision their own essays and teach them that there are many, many ways to write an essay—and all of them are “right.” “What the Spaces Say,” by Robert Root, delivered as a 2001 CCCC presentation, presents the function of the segmented essay and how it achieves that purpose:

“Beyond an expanding recognition of nonfiction as a literary genre, the most significant change in the nature of nonfiction in our time has been the sue of space as an element of composition. […] Segemented essays…depend on space, usually expressed as numbers or rows of asterisks or squiggly lines or white breaks in a text, as a fundamental element of design and expression. Knowing what the spaces say is vital for understanding the nonfictionist’s craft and appreciating the possibilities of this contemporary form; it also help us to better understand the nature of truth in the segmented essay.”

It’s one thing to consider space in the context of the outside world of place, the grounding that I require in this particular assignment, but it’s another thing entirely to consider space on the page. David A. Gruenewald writes of the importance of space in place-consciousness: “Just as place cannot be reduced to a point on a grid, neither can space, which has taken on metaphorical and cultural meanings that describe geographical relationships of power, contested territories of identity and difference, and aesthetic or even cybernetic experience” (622).

As we read Mark Tredinnick’s The Blue Plateau for WP3, students are often thrown by the fragmented structure, broken up into little sections that flash and circle each other. Through our discussions, we tease out the idea that there is no other way this book could be structured, because his relationship to the place is fragmented, broken. The structure itself articulates that just when the reader thinks they know a character or has some insight into the Kedumba Plateau, it’s over and Tredinnick moves to something else, which leaves the reader jarred and possibly confused. But that is deliberate—and teaching my students that nothing a writer does is accidental is a wonderful moment. If you’re confused, why would the writer want you confused? If you’re angry, why would the writer want you angry? And then, perhaps most importantly, how can you create the same types of reactions and emotions in your readers?

The discussion of structure within WP2 begins with Michele Morano’s “In the Subjunctive Mood” and Tom Coakley’s “How to Speak About the Secret Desert Wars,” as well as Robert Root’s “What the Spaces Say,” which is a segmented Essay about segmented Essays. The point of this particular day, the Quest of which is “What does it mean to consider the language of a place? And what happens if you can’t put language to it?” we discuss how many different languages the students speak and where they speak them, beyond English, Spanish, or French. We talk about the language of cars and mechanics, we talk about the language of fall in eastern Nebraska and how that’s different from fall in western Nebraska, we talk about how the language of Huskers Football at Memorial Stadium will likely not translate outside of Nebraska.

Michele Morano’s essay is written in the second person, in the form of a grammar lesson. The narrator is teaching the reader how to use the subjunctive mood in Spanish, but it is a gateway to the narrative itself, which is about Morano moving to Spain to escape a boyfriend she is afraid will kill himself. The use of second person, as we discuss, can be off-putting to a reader who has never had that particular experience—but, as we also have discussed many times by this point in the semester, nothing a writer does is accidental, so why would she do this? We talk through it and decide that the reader being told that “you” are doing something, feel a certain way, forces the reader to actually put themselves in that position and imagine what it is like. It takes away the reader’s freedom to feel what they will: Morano tells the reader what to feel, which echoes what she was feeling, the trapped feeling she was so desperate to escape. As we consider the structure of the grammar lesson, segmented and numbered, we consider what we would have lost if the piece had been a straight, chronological narrative. We discuss the subtext that she is not saying and how the structure itself, by providing breaks and white space, allows the reader to breathe, to consider what she has just presented, and then we move on.

Tom Coakley’s essay, “How to Speak of the Secret Desert Wars,” titles its sections with imperatives, turning the piece into a literal How To. We compare the section breaks, how they are used. We consider the function of the white space on the page. We discuss how the sections do exactly what the titles suggest, even those sections that seemingly have nothing to do with war at all. By coming in from a different direction, Coakley makes his point even more strongly. By using some of his sections to speak about things he cannot speak about—and some of the sections to not speak about those things he cannot speak about, he makes his overall point.

At this point, I remind my class that one of the first pieces we read in the class, W. Scott Olsen’s “The Love of Maps,” so the segmented essay is something we’ve been aware of since the very beginning. Getting students to consider space in their Writing Projects has been one of the most difficult premises of teaching the essay. They are so transfixed by the straight narrative form that they cannot conceive of white space, of breaking up the line. But the truth is this: the students who decide to be brave and try this segmented form have written some of the best essays that I have come across in my years of teaching.

ARTICULATION VI: AN ESSAYED CONCLUSION

One of the central tenets of place-conscious education is the active citizenry, the moving of students out of their local context into seeing how their local plays a part in the global, and moving to participating in that conversation. In this particular course, the active citizenry is less political than it is a measure of consciousness. My goal for this course is to give students a way of thinking of place as active, that neither the place nor themselves are passive. Home is not accidental. Community is not accidental. Ashfall didn’t happen by accident and neither did the Sandhills, Omaha or Lincoln or Chicago. The context they are creating themselves is not accidental: they are making choices that form what surrounds them. So it is fitting that the final reading of the semester, as we prepare to discuss the rough drafts of the final Writing Project, is the epilogue to Mark Tredinnick’s The Blue Plateau.

While Tredinnick’s book is ultimately about learning to belong to a place that wants no part of you and failing at it, the overall point of his book is that the attempt is necessary. It is necessary for Tredinnick himself to wonder why he feels connected here, even if the relationship is one-sided. The middle of the epilogue puts all of this into an active language that my students understand well by this point: it is not how long you are in a place that matters—what matters is how you are in that place:

“I must not blame the place, though, for my leaing—not even the town. I was always like this: I plateau. And I plateaued even there. […] Home is a verb—a word that dwells infinitely between those who say it often enough together. Home is the sayer and the said and above all it is the saying. Home is the conversation we make with what, and whom, we say we love; and what it’s about is who we are and always were. Home is a word—sometimes it is a whole sentence—for the ecology of belonging, and it includes deposition and erosion, the wet and the dry and the cold and the windl it includes the making and the unmaking, the coming and the going, and it isn’t always happy. Sometimes it rains, and sometimes it burns, and sometimes it falls and you fall with it. But home runs deep, and it runs hard, and sometimes it runs dry, and once it starts, it never seems to end” (232).

What happens after they leave the classroom? What do they know about place? What do they know about what it means to write an essay? And what have they learned about how place and essay give them a different way of active participation in their world? How has home turned into an active verb for them, rather than simply a noun? Some of this I will never know. But some of it I do. When I ask my students to write a reflection after each paper, the prompt asks them to consider who they might share their essay with. Most have an answer: family members, friends, and such. Almost never do I read a reflection where a student writes that he will never share it.

But there is another way: there are several literary magazines dedicated to publishing undergraduate work. Throughout the semester, I encourage students to send their work to these magazines, to submit their work to the departmental awards in the spring, to try to teach them that even though they may not identify themselves as writers, that is what they are. They may not choose to write for a living—or even for fun—but that does not mean they have not produced a work of writing that other people should read. Some students submit their work, some do not. But the point is that the active citizenry required of place-conscious education offers more outlets than political action. Sometimes the action is literary, sometimes the action is artistic, sometimes it is simply functional, but it is just as much a risk as protesting the Keystone XL pipeline through the Sandhills. Home is a verb, as much an active concept as writing, as much a space worthy of exploration as the page home is written on.

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-xi

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