Archive for the Writing Category

Having a Voice

Posted in Arts and Creativity, Healing and Recovery, People, Teaching, Writing on April 8, 2018 by Vince.Puzick

Rob Lessig had a vision. It wasn’t too sharply focused, and it was admittedly a bit of a crazy idea, but it all centered around one idea: “stories are relevant.” He wanted to create an event that would showcase storytelling and all the different modalities through which we tell stories: film, poetry, art, music. And the Storytelling Festival was born.

Rob, English teacher at Mitchell High School and founder of Ghost Factory Press, said the idea had its origin when he took a class on “narrative theory” a few years ago. Sounds like an English teacher, right? And the idea grew to fruition.

Saturday, at the City Auditorium in Colorado Springs, high school students, their teachers, and community members gathered and moved through small auditoriums in the building to take in student-produced films, a fashion show, dance, jazz concerts, and rock and roll sessions. The theme holding the evening together was story – how do we tell them, in what genre, and with what craft?

I hung out in the halls of the City Aud to check out the student art for sale, but my main focus was on the slam poetry event. Last spring, I had the privilege and honor of judging the Slam Poetry contest featuring students from Colorado Springs District 11 high schools.

The Storytelling Festival had a twist – the Teacher Poetry Slam. Teachers from D11 schools spit their best poems in fevered three minute poems. Students and audience members snapped fingers when they were moved and “ooohhed” and “ahhhhed” at lines that particularly sung to them.

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Student hosts provide some comedy before introducing the next teacher-poet.

The Teacher Poetry Slam ended in a three-way tie!  Dan Reicks from Russell Middle School, Sarah Hook and Andrew Ziegler from Mitchell all received PERFECT scores for their performances!

I was able to catch up to only three of the teachers who participated; other participating teachers were either swarmed by their students or they had made their way to some of the other events in the Aud.

I asked Miranda Popp, a teacher and colleague of Lessig’s at Mitchell High School, what was the power of slam poetry for these students. “It’s the empowerment itself. It gives formerly voiceless people the spotlight,” Popp said. Slam Poetry often is very introspective with topics ranging from commentary on social issues, to identity, to abuse, to questions about gender. Miranda said that slam poetry is healing: “the speaker heals from saying it; the others heal from listening to it.”

Slams are competitions among poets and are judged on delivery and language use, as well as the message delivered. This isn’t your restrained “poetry reading”; slams are performance art. While some slams can be a bit aggressive (for lack of a better term) in crowd response and scoring, the teachers in D11 have done a great job to create a positive event — seen in the vulnerable topics the students choose and the supportive spirit the audience offers.

Todd Hegert, an English teacher from Palmer High, agreed. “Slam poetry is so strong on word play, in language, and in telling a story” that it sets it apart from other poetic forms or events and it is “more compelling” to the current student population. “They get to tell their story, talk about the world around them, work toward solutions.” In the long run, Todd says, these “young voices are equipped with the language to shift the political and social landscape.”

One teacher I could not interview, but all three of the other teachers mentioned, is Chris Hartman from Coronado High School. His work with students and his efforts in creating the student Poetry Slam competition are recognized by students and teachers, alike.

“I love how this night showcased students and the arts,” Popp said. “Arts are so important to our students, and show that our students are human beings. This is more important than the standardized assessments” that are so much part of their educational world.

 

Lessig agreed, saying that once the expenses are met, the rest of the proceeds from the evening will be donated to arts education in our community. He reminded me that all the events tonight – the films, music, art, dance – were student created.

“The arts build community,” he said. And, as the program for the night’s event stated, “Stories create our world.”

 

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Creative Forces Community Summit

Posted in Arts and Creativity, Healing and Recovery, People, Writing on February 19, 2018 by Vince.Puzick

Let’s start with the stories.

A panel of four veterans ended Day One of the Creative Forces Summit by telling part of their story. Staff Sergeant Cory Sandoval, First Sergeant David Griego, Sergeant Curt Bean, and Lieutenant Colonel Walter Ernst shared their experience coming home and reintegrating back into the civilian life following their combat duty.

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“Whatever you come back with has no cure,” LT. Col. Ernst told the approximately 200 attendees at the Summit. “It’s part of the culture of combat. You don’t come home the same (as when you went in).”

The others told parts of their stories – because the stories are all unique to the veteran yet common themes run through – that echoed those sentiments. “I deal with a lot of guilt each day,” SSgt Sandoval reflected. They also commented on the “15 Things Veterans Want You to Know” which was really informative for a civilian like me to hear.

The Summit, part of the network of Creative Forces initiatives happening throughout the country, was the launch of the community efforts to help veterans heal from the trauma of their combat experiences. The Colorado Springs region – with its military presence here – is one of eleven sites in the NEA Military Healing Arts Network.

The Network brings together the 3 Cs for creative arts therapies to foster the healing process: Clinical (Medical Research, Creative Arts Therapies, and Telehealth services), Community (State, Regional, and Local Arts Organizations, Veterans Networks), and Capacity Building (Training & Education, Digital Resource Centers, and Medical Research). These three components put creative arts therapies at the core of patient-centered care.

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Held at the beautiful ENT Center for the Arts on the UCCS campus, the Summit brought various local arts organizations together with military representatives to hear the clinical support veterans receive and to hear the work of the arts organizations that currently provide community support for our veterans. The Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region (COPPeR) in conjunction with the Colorado Creative Industries will serve as the administrative lead for our community’s local Creative Forces initiative with support from, among others, the National Endowment for the Arts, Americans for the Arts, and Fort Carson to spearhead these efforts.

A panel of local arts organizations presented on their efforts to provide art therapies to veterans. We heard reports from the following local arts organizations:

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The creative arts therapies allow veterans to tap into ways to “identify, name, and process their trauma.” That trauma may manifest itself in Traumatic Brain Injury, PTSD, or chronic and debilitating pain. The creative arts therapies give them multiple ways “in” that other therapies may not tap into. Through music, visual arts, movement, or writing, veterans are able to use the resources they might learn in their clinical sessions – tools like mindfulness, socialization strategies, expressing feelings, ways to enhance reasoning and thinking skills. The combination of clinical approaches and the community arts organizations allow veterans to treat the wounds of war and come home whole.

The invisible wounds of war, wounds that have a physical, emotional, and economic impact on the veterans, are healed through connection (engaging the veteran), communication (controlling their own narrative), and creativity (veterans want to help and serve and the creative arts allow them to tap into what they can create).

The keynote speaker on Day Two for the culmination of the Summit was a presentation by Stacy Pearsall. Pearsall, combat disabled and retired from military service, served as a military photojournalist during three combat tours in the Middle East. She is the founder of the Veterans Portrait Project which arose out of her desire to turn her photography into art and capture the portraits of veterans to honor their service. You can view Pearsall’s work on the Veterans Portrait Project website.

Attending the Creative Forces Summit was a very humbling experience. To hear the veterans’ stories, to move toward understanding the process of healing their combat trauma, and to hear their own perspective on their experience was completely enlightening. More than one of them said that they didn’t want pity or sympathy from their community, and they encouraged us to think of those soldiers who lost their lives as the real “heroes.” What I heard from them was that they want to heal the wounds that we cannot see and that we might barely be able to understand.

And it is through the arts that makes that healing possible.

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“Press at the Edge of Memory and Truth”

Posted in Observations, People, Writing on October 24, 2017 by Vince.Puzick

Mary Karr talks with Sherman Alexie at The New Yorker Festival 2017

October 6, 2017

nyfWhen I heard that Mary Karr was going to have a 90-minute conversation with Sherman Alexie as part of the New Yorker Festival of 2017, I had to find a way to get to NYC.  I searched flights from Denver to LaGuardia, searched lodging on TripAdvisor, mapped out an itinerary.  After I had the logistics of the trip mapped out, I realized that on October 7, the morning after their conversation, I had to be in Denver for a commitment to present at a conference.  The adrenaline rush to hear two of my favorite writers puddled into disappointment. 

But I kept at the planning.  And an unlikely solution came to me.  I’d fly out on Friday morning, arrive in the City around 3:00, find the theater, have dinner, and go listen to the conversation which would end at 8:30.  I’d catch the flight back to Denver at 10:45 and arrive at DIA around 1:00 a.m.  A long day, seventeen hours, but sandwiched in between flights would be a literary event I would not have the opportunity to experience any other way. 

In the dark theater of the School of Visual Arts in the Chelsea neighborhood, I scribbled notes in the composition notebook I always carry, sporadic chicken scratchings, scrawled out haphazardly and cross-ways to the lined paper.

So what stuck from the 90 minutes?

In the best moments, it felt like eavesdropping on two people who hold huge mutual respect for each other talking about family, in general, and more specifically about Sherman Alexie’s newest work, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, a memoir about his relationship with his mother who died in July of 2015.  Of course, they were also “on” and their conversation had an audience; the act of being observed changes the nature of the object being observed.  We were, in essence, a part of the event.

There were awkward moments in the conversation like there are in any other conversation.  Moments when Mary’s question (it was such an intimate space that I am going to sometimes use first names), a good question, caused Sherman to pause, gather his thoughts, and in some instances, collect himself before answering.  He became choked up with some responses, like when he commented on how his mother probably saved his life:  “the first was when she quit drinking and the second was when she let me leave the rez.”

Karr’s questions were almost those of a therapist – exploring, pressing Sherman to reveal motivations behind the book, the drive to tell the story about his relationship with his mother.  And he said early in the conversation, “I had never written about her before” that he “avoided writing about her” and was somewhat “scared of writing honestly about my mother. I wanted to be truthful.”  Mary said later, “your book is very loving” toward her and it was a book that had to be written.

At one point, Sherman said something like “I knew there would be this priestly thing” about having this conversation with Mary.  So maybe the conversation was somewhat confessional since they joked about Mary’s Catholicism and Sherman’s belief system characterized by what he calls “spiritual coincidences.”

At other times, she probed about the nature of memoir writing.  She asked him if he considered writing this book as fiction.  In the first three months after his mother’s death, Sherman wrote something like 150 poems and “thought [he] had a book of poetry.”  And somehow it morphed into his first – and what sounds like his last – memoir.  “I’m not going to do it again!” he laughed when Mary pressed him about the challenge of writing memoir, a genre, she joked, that’s “very ghetto in the literature world. You’ve sunk to the bottom.”

In the midst of writing my own memoir, I was an active and reflective listener during the dialogue, listening carefully as Karr mentioned how family stories change depending on who is telling them and with the different occasions and contexts for the telling.  How we move, as Sherman said, from being “the boy on the kitchen floor,” absorbing the stories and experiences in the family, to being the storyteller, the voice for the family stories and family history.  And that shift is always a jolt as you may hold on to an idea that you convince yourself is true about your family – but perspective, time, and memory may ultimately challenge that idea.

And there it was, the heart of the conversation, the reason I was there eavesdropping: the steady pulse throughout their talk about family, truth, and memory.   To illustrate, Sherman’s memoir includes the story of his mother being conceived by rape told three different times in the memoir.  And when Sherman told how he came to write that story of his mother (and of his older sister who was also conceived by a rape), Mary expressed her admiration at his “willingness to press at all the edges of memory and truth and how stories are told in your family.”

My daughter would ask, once I was back in Colorado, if attending the conversation was a life-changing event.  I had to think for a minute.  Did the conversation change my life?  It was a once-in-a-lifetime event in many ways – but did that make it life-changing? If I had to label it something, the label would be “life affirming” or at least “affirming of a writerly life.”

It affirmed the power of stories and the necessity of telling them. It’s through sharing our experience in the world that we may give others strength and hope.

I’m left these three weeks later, summoning the courage to press at the edges of memory, to tell my one, true story.

Why “A Natural Drift”?

Posted in Writing on October 14, 2017 by Vince.Puzick

When I first started fly fishing, a guide I was with on the river told me that I needed my dry fly to have “a natural drift” as it floated on the water’s surface.  The fly could not drag across the water or look unnatural in any way.  The fly’s actions and presence had to fool the fish into thinking it was the real deal.  The phrase stuck in my head — for both fly fishing and then for writing.

I thought of all the meanings of the word “drift” —

  • be carried slowly by a current of air or water (verb)
  • be blown into heaps by the wind (verb)
  • a continuous slow movement from one place to another (noun)
  • the general intention or meaning of an argument or someone’s remarks (noun)

All of the definitions apply in my life and here, in this blog.

I suppose that a blog of too general of a nature runs contrary to all that is written about effective blog management.  It seems that blogs should be specific, have clear purposes, be well-defined.  I, for sure, see the value in those blogs with a singleness of purpose (and I maintain one related specifically to fly fishing for Angler’s Covey).  But I also know myself — and my interests and thoughts are carried by currents around me, are in motion from one place to another.

A Natural Drift will, if I can build on this metaphor of rivers and flow, have two main tributaries:  creativity and conservation.  Many of the blog posts will focus on artistic expression and the creative process — whether in visual arts, theater, photography, film, or writing.  My curiosity leads me to wonder about, research, and explore the process that artists use to develop their craft. I will also share my awe in experiencing the end results of those efforts.

And I am also in awe of our natural world around us, Creation in the bigger sense.  I grew up and came of age exploring the mountains of the Pikes Peak region and throughout Colorado.  This blog’s other tributary will advocate for the conservation and preservation of our public lands and our natural resources.  It will express my love for and awe of the natural world — how nature rejuvenates our soul, challenges our physical body, and connects our spirit to something greater than ourselves.

At the confluence of these rivers will be education and information.  As an educator for over thirty years — from classroom teacher to literacy and language content specialist at the district and state level — I value teaching and learning.  Hopefully, A Natural Drift will serve to inform, educate, and stimulate readers to be involved in the arts community in our region and in conservation efforts across our state and country.

No doubt there will be certain topics that surface and recur in this blog — topics that are the small streams and rivulets that feed those tributaries: entries from road trips and “slow movement” around Colorado, commentaries on issues I find important in my life today (free speech and the First Amendment, memory and truth, funding for the arts and art education, protecting our public lands), writing (in general) and the teaching of writing (in particular).

My hope is that as I delve into these topics and themes and share my navigations, I can create dialogue or, at the very least, stimulate thinking from those who may come across this blog, and I hope that you may be carried along on this natural drift.

My other hope is that I can support the artists and outdoor recreation industry around the Pikes Peak region in their efforts to create a rich community and environment.  If you have a need for a writer, researcher, or copy editor in print and/or social media, please contact me at vincent.puzick@gmail.com.  I can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, too.

 

dic-tion-ar-y

Posted in Observations, Teaching, Writing on October 1, 2016 by Vince.Puzick

I’ve always been relatively neutral in the hard copy book versus kindle versions debate. I like the feel and touch of paperbacks or hardcovers, but not having those formats is not necessarily a deal breaker for me. I understand the sentimentality of holding a book in one’s hand, maybe marking cool images or commenting on passages in the margin. And I get the convenience of having five or six or ten novels on my Kindle – easily accessible at any point. The highlight and annotation features on the Kindle are great to use. Regardless of format, it’s the content that stimulates my thinking or moves me emotionally.

This past week, though, when I was visiting a second grade class, I was intrigued by the student’s introduction to dictionary work. She was working with a small group of five students and introduced the task to them.The teacher admitted it was a rough intro; we’ve all been there as veteran teachers. You just slightly underestimate kids’ readiness to tackle the learning.

The target word, pulled from the students’ reading, was “horror.” The teacher distributed five copies of the Scholastic Children’s Dictionary and students dug in. The teacher worked with them on header words at the top of each page. When all the students were on the page with the beautiful picture of the horse, she directed their attention to the different entries until they found “horror.”

At one point, a girl in the group said, “This is hard. So many words!”

And it was at that point that my note taking on the class took a turn. I continued to listen and watch, but my attentiveness shifted to reflection rather than observation. She is so right. So many words on that page. And so many pages!

I went back to my elementary days and the fascination with dictionaries. We had dictionary games in fifth and sixth grade. The teacher would give us a word and we would try to guess the definition. Then the students with dictionaries would find the word, read the definition, and we would laugh if we were far off and cheer when somebody was close to the definition.

In all honesty, during my second grade classroom observation, I got a bit sentimental and nostalgic for those hard copy dictionaries. I watched as kids negotiated their way through the thick book, possibly the thickest book they have held in their hands.

I realized that with Google and with Siri, I can do a search or simply ask for the definition of a word. On my Kindle, I can click a word and see the definition. As can the students in that second grade class. And all of a sudden I felt a bit of sadness for them.

I loved having that dictionary open on my desk in Mrs. Meyer’s sixth grade class. And not just to find the target word of the day or to seek out the definition of the word she called out. I liked reading the word above the target word and the word after it. I liked to flip a few pages and find some random words to explore.

And I remember being introduced to the Oxford English dictionary in Dr. Boni’s class at Colorado State University and having the same reaction as the young second grade scholar: “So many words!”

To-do List: Things I Have Never Written About (but maybe should)

Posted in Observations, People, Places, Teaching, Writing on September 28, 2016 by Vince.Puzick
  1. Colorado Springs. I have written about places before – different houses we’ve lived in, places I have hiked or fished. Mesa Verde. Lost Creek Wilderness Area. But I have never written about my hometown with any real focus or commitment. I was born and raised here, have seen the changes that time and people have brought to the city, and have observed how things have stayed the same, too. I’ve wondered about the identify of the place – home of Fort Carson, the Air Force Academy, NORAD, Focus on the Family (a transplant from California). I’ve pondered Penrose Hospital – the first building to rise up over ten stories, my mother’s employer for 40 years, my birthplace. I’ve thought about the neighborhoods – Wood Avenue, Tejon Street with tree-lined homes of doctors, lawyers, and Colorado College professors. Of Roswell, the homes of blue-collar workers from the assembly line who worked with my dad. How Colorado Springs sits at the base of Pikes Peak, America’s mountain, the Colorado 14er furthest to the east. It’s not a mountain town or a town on the prairie. Military town? College town? Tourist destination? Olympic City (I heard that on the TV)?
  2. Baseball. America’s pastime. My boyhood passion. I played in little league baseball starting when I was eight years old and played through high school. I was on the Red Sox, the A’s, the Orioles. We played “homerun derby,” 500, wiffle ball at Bonny Park. We mimicked our heroes – Reggie Jackson, Clemente, Bob Gibson. Me mocked our foes – Pete Rose, Yaz, Wilbur Wood. I played epic one-on-one pitch-and-hit battles with my older, southpaw brother. He struck me out way more often than I got hits off of him. I chased him through the fields surrounding our house, me waving the bat above my head. I was never a good loser. Ten summers of organized ball. Family vacations postponed until August and built around little league schedules – Saturday morning games, afternoon practices. Championships were celebrated. Losses were mourned. Friendships made.
  3. My Mother. I have written relentlessly, filled up reams, about my father. I have only rarely written about my mother. Short bursts of an image of her, a recollection of a conversation, or her devotion to a nursing career. I wrote a poem about her once, “Sestina for the Nuns,” about her work at Penrose Hospital, run by the Sisters of Charity. I have down some notes, and I have certainly pondered her life, but I have not written about her with the same sustained energy and focus that I have about my father. Maybe it is the same as poetry; we are motivated by the pain of the human experience to write poetry more than we are motivated from that place of beauty and peace. Maybe it has been easier to write about the dysfunction of my dad than the strength and consistency of my mother. I have not written about our evening conversation at Penrose Hospital, her first bout with lung cancer, when the loudspeaker said “Visiting hours end in 15 minutes” and I stayed another 45. The staff, her colleagues, understood.
  4. Reluctant Readers. I was a reluctant reader throughout high school. A typical high school boy (some may argue that it doesn’t have to be typical), I was more interested in baseball, backpacking, and eventually beer than in books. I was, still am, a strong reader, but in school I would make my way through the assigned reading and basically call it good. I’d devour Sports Illustrated. Outdoor Life. Field and Stream. It wasn’t until I worked in a factory, White Automotive, after dropping out of college, that I became interested in the written word. And my interest was borne from the impulse to write while working on the assembly line at Whitco. And it wasn’t until I declared myself an English major – due to that interest in writing rather than reading – that I turned the corner as a reader. I was naïve, in fact, when I declared as an English major and came to realize, you know, how much actual reading that academic major required. Add on a minor in history and my nights were spent in Morgan Library on the CSU campus.
  5. Fatherhood. I was 36 years old when my daughter was born. I have written some things about her – poems, mainly, and occasional observances of her life – but I have not written about my own observations about and experiences as a father. For a long part of that time, I was a single father. Jessica’s mother and I were divorced when Jess was about a year old, so I experienced being a parent with shared custody. When Jess entered middle school, she lived with me for all but her 8th grade year. I haven’t written about the joy of watching her mature. I haven’t written about the conversation in the kitchen that gradually grew heated as it headed to an argument and then, in a memorable moment, turned to provide such a lesson. So here it is: I was standing at the kitchen sink, rinsing that night’s dinner dishes. Jessica was leaning against the doorframe between the kitchen and the dining room. I don’t recall the topic of our conversation, but it was escalating. I finally said to her, “Jess, I am learning what it is like to parent a 16-year old.” She looked across the kitchen at me and said “And I’m learning what it’s like to be 16.” But I haven’t written about that.
  6. Teaching. For nearly 30 years, I have pursued my career in education. The first 15 of those years were in the classroom. I have written a brief article or two about specific strategies or instructional practices, but I have not explored my own philosophies, perspectives, or experiences in the classroom or in my roles outside of the classroom. I haven’t written about the moments that evoked great pride in my students: the student journalists on the Palmer newspaper (The Lever); the scores on the IB exams; the conversations about Song of Solomon, Mary Oliver and Eavan Boland poetry, the narratives we wrote. Mike and Ian emphatically pointing at the book and yelling “Let’s go back to the text! Where’s the evidence?” I haven’t written about those less-than-stellar moments of my teaching – the sarcastic response, the dropped f-bomb, the poorly planned lesson. I haven’t written about the tears shed at the loss of a student due to a heart problem, the ache in my heart hearing about a student suicide, the collective grief over Columbine.
  7. On Keeping a Notebook. Or this one could be called Regrets. I have had maybe two dozen attempts at keeping some sort of a writer’s notebook for a long, long time. Only in the last 5-7 years, though, have I routinely written in one. I have had some great starts in the past, but I could never really settle on what the notebook should “look like” – what should be written, how should that writing sound. None of that matters. Not the way entries look on the page. Not the way they sound. Dated or undated entries. Should it read like a diary or like Lewis and Clark’s journals? Visuals and drawings like da Vinci? None of that matters. Just get stuff down. Instead, I only have memory and recall to draw from. So I should write about writing … I should write about keeping a writer’s notebook to those who are reluctant to do so or not sure why or what or what it should look like. Just show up. Lined or unlined? College-ruled or narrow? It. Does. Not. Matter. Writing does.

 

The Power of Modeling

Posted in People, Teaching, Writing with tags , , on September 28, 2015 by Vince.Puzick

I’ve written six 500-word (or so) memoirs this past month and a half.  That’s due, in part, because of my love of the genre, but primarily these memoirs were composed as part of the instructional process as I guided two classes of high school sophomores (their triptych memoir as discussed in the Kirby’s article “Contemporary Memoir:  A 21st Century Genre Ideal for Teens”) and four classes of seniors through the process of composing their own memoirs.

Modeling is a powerful practice in the writing classroom — if not in all classrooms.  I wanted students to hear my thinking processes as I grappled with the same assignment in front of them.  My modeling moved from the initial brainstorming to uncover potential memoir topics (I used a couple of different strategies — “Stones in the River” and “Map My Neighborhood” — to approach the assignment) to drafting and revising the essay, and cleaning it up with some editing strategies.  We did Peter Elbow’s “looping” strategy to get to the heart of the reflection of the memoir — why is this memory even significant?  At each step of the way, using the document camera, my students listened as I thought through my own writing.

As an aside, one of the examples of instructional modeling I have experienced as a student was on the South Platte River with my friend and fishing guide, Steve.  As he taught me the techniques for putting a dry fly on the water so that it floated naturally to entice fish, he modeled the casting motion, watched as I attempted the same, and guided my “revision” process standing there side-by-side.  He didn’t “tell me” how to cast. He showed me.  He didn’t demonstrate and walk away.  He demonstrated then responded to my attempts with guidance, praise, and (because he’s my friend) some good natured kidding.

One discovery I made in this instructional practice is that I need to be careful as I talk through my process.  I want students to maintain ownership over their own papers, so I want them to mimic the thinking and decision-making process.  I model the thinking so they can follow a similar process to make decisions about their own writing.  One of my favorite questions I pose to myself and, later, pose to my students begins “What if…?”

  • “What if I develop this potential topic with some details and see what I discover;  is it meaty enough to pursue?”
  • “What if I craft these two sentences into one?”
  • “What if I break this paragraph into a couple of paragraphs to change the pace and emphasis? (Yes, that would mean that I may have a one-sentence paragraph.)”

So I wrote one in each of my classes.  Why?  Why didn’t I just fudge it and show subsequent classes the brainstormings and drafts that I did in the earlier class periods?  Simple.  The product at the end of the brainstorming session is only as valuable as the process to develop it.  I liken it to downloading a PDF of a powerpoint from the Internet rather than actually being at the presentation where the powerpoint was used.  Sure, I have a product — but I don’t hear the nuance, hear the thinking behind the slides, the inflection of voice, the speaker’s laugh or the asides.

Students benefit from hearing the thinking behind the arrows moving their eyes around the brainstorming; they need the reasons why things are scratched out and written over in the draft;  they need to hear how the ideas originally in the last paragraph end up being presented earlier and throughout the essay instead of lumped together at the end.  They need to hear me grapple with a decision, struggle with a revision, rethink where I was going as I head where the memoir needs to go.

While none of this may seem particularly new or groundbreaking, as I worked through the process with students, it became clear how powerful modeling is to give guidance, to stimulate thinking, and, ultimately, to release responsibility for their own work.

Lit as Protest

Posted in Teaching, Writing on September 6, 2015 by Vince.Puzick

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The Memoirist at the High School Reunion: Part 1

Posted in People, Writing on August 23, 2015 by Vince.Puzick

Mining for gold.  Drinking from a firehose.  Kid in a candy shop.

Whatever idiom used, when you fancy yourself to be a memoirist, going to a high school reunion is not just a trip down memory lane.  It’s not mere reminiscing, this conversation over finger foods;  it’s priming the pump.  It’s kindling for the fire.  It’s prewriting.

I spent about eight hours with folks from my high school’s graduating class, the class of 1975 from William J. Palmer High School, this past weekend.  From teammates on the baseball team, to the academically motivated kids I passed in the hallways but didn’t really share many classes, to the band kids, smoker kids, kids who climbed on rocks — the 100+ or so who made it to the 40th reunion mingled and shared stories of the past and current stories of their present.

In more than a couple of conversations, I started questions with “Do you remember …” which must be some sort of memoirist mantra.  The memoirist is cursed;  remembering isn’t just about the memory filtered by time and distance and shaped by other experiences.  The memory isn’t just about recalling the facts — or something resembling the facts.  As Mary Karr said in her Paris Review interview “More important than remembering the facts, I have to poke at my own innards.” It’s about finding some meaning in the remembered experience, some emotional truth in the facts.

I’d ask “do you remember …” in part to confirm that the experience did, indeed, happen but also to see and hear the emotion behind their recollection.  Did they cringe or grin?  Grimace in disbelief at the “man, we’re lucky to be alive” memory?  I didn’t look at their response to be a mirror of my own recollection (it couldn’t be!) but as a way to access my own response, my own emotion to that memory.

Members of Palmer High's 1975 baseball team. Missing some key guys, though! Members of Palmer High’s 1975 baseball team. Missing some key guys, though!

So the memoirist at the high school reunion gets to hear different perspectives around shared experiences — which are not shared memories.  A bunch of boys were sitting in the booth in the back of the Bon Pharmacy enjoying cherry cokes (when they actually had to mix the cherry syrup with the Coca-Cola at the fountain) when Dave P (maybe 13 or 14 at the time) snagged that housefly right out of the air and then, for twenty-five cents, swallowed it down.  Taken separately, that event is just evidence of the strangeness of teen boys;  in the bigger context of my life around Bonny Park, it speaks of a time and of relationships that were impactful. Similarly, we were all at Gerry Berry Stadium when Tony S, paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident several months before graduation, received his diploma, pushed across the stage in a wheelchair.  Yes, the scene was emotional.  But it is an event in a larger memory landscape that has meaning, that shapes me, that is part of the arc from the booth at the pharmacy to graduating from high school.

Mary Karr says “With memoir, you have the events and manufacture or hopefully deduce the concept.”  I have the events — and a headful of notes about more.

So if memoirs are beyond the “what” of remembering;  it is the “why” of remembering.  What is worth writing about?  And why is it worthy of that time, energy, and emotion?

I’ll need to get back to you.

A reflective moment on the memoir

Posted in Observations, People, Writing on December 30, 2011 by Vince.Puzick

A friend of mine asked me what I had learned over the course of the year in which I wrote nearly every day for a minimum of 15 minutes and which resulted in the first draft of a memoir.  He said “I mean, learn as a writer or learn about yourself or learn about your family.”

So, what did I learn (as I begin year two with deep revision)?

I learned that with 15 minutes a day one can produce a lot of text — some not so good, some pretty cool, some rough-pine needing to be planed and sanded.  The 15 minutes of writing time were often built on flickering insights or on  glimmers of images and hazy scenes that would get shaped the next day.  Somedays, 15 minutes turned into 30.  On a few occasions, 15 minutes turned into four hours.  Somedays had a seamless movement back into the writing.  Somedays .. not so much.

As a writer, I rush too much.  I rush during the writing and I rush through scenes that need a patient hand to shape.  I want a finished product without the blood and sweat of multiple revisions.  Not gonna happen.  So the writing is uneven, like a wedge of clay not centered correctly on the pottery wheel — it wobbles unsteadily and has weird bulges.  So  I need to craft each part of the text which still seems unwieldy at almost 300 pages.  I should have stuck with fly fishing haiku.

I learned that entry points matter.  The story could have a dozen different “ways in” — and each choice, of course, shapes what comes next.  The essence of my revision right now is due to a move I made with an event that showed up 45 pages deep in the first draft and is now the opening 11 pages .  It was the right move that has resulted in ripple effects through the remainder of the book.

I learned that my family is comprised of incredible individuals — and has been for a long time.  But my immediate family — maybe not so great as a collective “family.”  We experienced — as a family — a lot of devastating events in our history and those events took their toll.  In going through boxes of pictures, old journals from my Aunt Mary, newspapers, receipts — I discovered the twists and turns that shape a heritage, that shape a family history.  I discovered that you can break links in the chain, shape new patterns.  As a friend of mine said when I visited in San Antonio:  the richness is in our inheritance whatever that may be.

I learned that people love “story.”  In the course of the last year, I contacted a man with whom I had lost contact for over 30 years.  Jimmie was instrumental in my life.  A steady and unlikely  influence when I lacked direction,  Jimmie said “get the education” when I was simply so lost I didn’t even know I was lost. When I talked with him in the spring of 2011 (33 years since I last talked with him), he recalled stories and details of our friendship that I thought were just bits and pieces of my own memory.  So I had to ponder a little bit — I know what I got out of my friendship with Jimmie…what did he get out of our 12 month co-worker/friend experience?

Finally, I learned how deeply friendships and family events course through my veins.  If nothing else ever comes of this piece of writing, it brought me not just clarity but an understanding of my family that I never would have otherwise experienced.  Writing shifts thinking.

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