Memory

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

One of My Favorite Books: Body and Soul

Body and Soul (Frank Conroy)

A fairly recent addition to my favorite shelf. I started it about eight pm one night and finished it about twelve hours later. That’s only the third time I’ve pulled an all-nighter to finish a book I couldn’t put down.


Body and Soul

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, O'Connor & Malamud

Writers who have mattered greatly to me include Hemingway and Fitzgerald, of course. GATSBY is for me the perfect novel and "Deal with the Dead" has some little homages to GATSBY buried away in it. Later, when I discovered the stories of Flannery O'Connor, I began to understand whole new possibilities for viewing the world. Ultimately, I fell in love with the work of Bernard Malamud and have read everything he has written, many of the books several times. The first stories I wrote were imitations of Hemingway, but Malamud and O'Connor were the influences for the first success I had as a writer. I published seven or eight stories in literary magazines, all trying to tread that line between fabulism and realism that they walk so well.

An Interview with Les Standiford by Steve Glassman. Standiford is the founding director of the MFA program in writing at Florida International University.

Being a Stay-at-Home Dad

I’m a little old to be a new father. Fifty-four to be exact. But life can be amusing at times and it seems I’m now entering the slapstick era of my life. The duties of being a stay-at home Dad were not foisted upon me, nor the result of being unemployed. It was a practical solution to current living arrangements and a position for which I volunteered.

My wife Lorraine teaches 5th grade, is an adjunct professor at the local University (UNCA), a writer, and lecturer. More importantly, she has insurance. I’m a writer, without insurance, who works at home for a few hours a day and spends the rest of the time reading and piddling around. At least I did in my former life. Now I am working for a demanding boss who points, grunts, and expects me to do her will.

It’s the hardest job I’ve ever had. If interested, "fasten your seatbelts," as Betty Davis said in All About Eve, "it's going to be a bumpy ride."

Parsing Out Grammar

Maybe I was just an odd kid, but one of my favorite childhood pastimes was diagramming sentences. I hadn't thought about diagramming in years, until I read recently about a teacher in Gaithersburg, Md., who has re-introduced the lost art into her Advanced Placement English classes in the high school where she teaches.

I learned how to diagram sentences in elementary school or what we used to call, appropriately, grammar school. By the time I was in high school, I drew diagrams only when I was stuck figuring out where to place a modifier or whether to use an adverb or adjective. Today, I suspect you would get a blank stare if you asked even the brightest students the difference between an adverb and an adjective.

Robyn Jackson, the Gaithersburg teacher, didn't learn about diagramming when she was in school. Progressive teachers and their professional associations, especially the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), believe diagramming sentences is make-work that bores students and turns them off to writing. So they banished diagramming from the classroom years ago, along with most grammar instruction.

Just 30 years old, Miss Jackson is, as education reporter Jay Matthews writes in The Washington Post, "as daring as the scientists who revived dinosaurs in 'Jurassic Park.' " Miss Jackson came across the arcane technique of diagramming when she was searching for a way to teach her advanced students about the functions of the various parts of speech. She found an old grammar book filled with odd drawings of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines, with words laid out like pieces of a puzzle. The more she studied the diagrams, the more she thought it would be a fascinating way to help her students improve their writing. "Many of my students are very bright and have learned how to counterfeit writing proficiency," Miss Jackson told Mr. Matthews.

Even if the smartest students can fake their way through most writing assignments, most students can't. Most high school students cannot write a coherent, intelligible essay on any topic. According to a recent study of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, barely one-fourth of students write at or above the proficient level, and a shocking 1 percent write at an advanced level.

For years now, schools have been teaching students to "express" themselves, without worrying about transmitting the finer points of grammar and syntax. The latest fads in education theory discouraged teachers from placing too much emphasis on correcting students' work, encouraging them to praise creativity instead. But effective communication always entails understanding the rules. There are no shortcuts to good writing.

So why does the NCTE insist "the teaching of grammar does not serve any practical purpose for most students"? According to these educrats, teaching grammar "does not improve reading, speaking, writing or even editing" for most students. That's a little like saying that structural engineers don't need to understand the properties of certain metals if they want to build better or stronger buildings. Or, telling aerospace engineers they don't need to learn the laws of physics.

I suspect the dismal showing of American students on writing proficiency tests has much to do with the attitudes of educators who don't think it's worth their time to try to teach the rules of grammar. Teaching the parts of speech, the difference between a verbal and a verb, and why the active voice is preferable to the passive in most writing demands hard work on the part of teachers. It's a lot easier to encourage students to scribble their thoughts on a piece of paper, without attention to form. But when we eliminate the basics, we shouldn't wonder why students can't express themselves well.

I bet Robyn Jackson's students will be better writers for her efforts. Who knows, they may even look back fondly on those days spent, rulers in hand, diagramming sentences. As my writing teacher, Sister Marie Florence, used to say, "If you can't diagram it, don't write it."

(Linda Chavez)

Seeking a Vision of Truth, Guided by a Higher Power

Robert Frost called his art a lover's quarrel with the world. Ernest Hemingway said a writer must have the probity of a priest of God. George Orwell believed the writer's task was to set right the injustices caused by what he called the bloody hand of the empire at work. I think all three men could no more stop writing than they could will themselves to stop breathing. Hemingway, in the same statement about probity, said that once writing became the artist's greatest pleasure as well as his greatest vice, the only thing that could separate him from it was death.

When I was a teacher of creative writing, a student would occasionally ask me if I thought he had talent, if indeed he should try to make a career of his writing. I never answered the question, because the student had asked the wrong question. A real writer is driven both by obsession and a secret vanity, namely that he has a perfect vision of the truth, in the same way that the camera lens can close perfectly on a piece of the external world. If the writer does not convey that vision to someone else, his talent turns to a self-consuming bitterness.

I have never been able to see more than two or perhaps three scenes ahead in a story. For me the creative process is more one of discovery than creation.

Jack Kerouac said that there was no such thing as failure in art, not when you genuinely invest yourself in it. What a critic might call failure is just part of larger work that is ongoing.

The material for the stories is everywhere. The whole human family becomes your cast of characters. You can give voice to those who have none and expose those who would turn the earth into a sludge pit. As an artist you have automatic membership in a group that is loathed, feared and denigrated by every dictator and demagogue in the world.

from Seeking a Vision of Truth, Guided by a Higher Power (James Lee Burke)

An Interview with Gary Paulsen

What do you think is one of the biggest misunderstandings people have about a writing career?

PAULSEN: I've actually had a young writer say to me, "I didn't know it would be that much work." A lot of people want to have written. A lot of people want to have run the Iditarod or sailed to Fiji on a boat alone, but very few people actually do it. A lot of people want to have done it. They want to be discovered while they're sitting in a bus depot writing poetry on a napkin, but it doesn't happen that way.

What is your first piece of advice to writers?

PAULSEN: You can't learn to write in a work­shop. You can't learn in school or through a class. Writing is not going to help you learn to write. Writing is talking, and on can never learn anything when you're talking. You have to read, and I mean three books a day. Read them all. Reading is the thing that ill teach you. Make it an occupation. Read all the time. Literally, two or three books a day, And read them over again. Read some hooks eight or 10 times.

I've read Moby Dick eight or times, and it changes ever time you read it. One way, it's a about whaling, The next way is metaphysics. Or you can look at it as a love story in kind of a sick way. Stein, Pound, Hemingway‑if on haven't tried to figure out the rhythms and pacings and lion that brain of theirs works, you can't start writing.

Once a writer has studied and is ready, what is your advice as far as writing that manuscript and getting it published?

PAULSEN: It's really simple. Double‑space. 1‑inch margins and no errors. You can't base a misspelling. You have to compete with me. If you arid I send a manuscript to Random House, they are going to pick me because I'm popular and they cart sell a lot of books. That means, right out of the box, you've got to be better than these other guys who've got 200 books published and have won all kinds of awards. You've got to be better than Hemingway or Steinbeck on your first book. On your first book you've got to be that good! It's a hard business. Absolutely brutal. And it's all you. You don't have a boss or someone telling you what to do. It's all about your own self‑discipline. Steinbeck said the hardest thing was getting your ass in back of that typewriter.

from an interview with the children's author Gary Paulsen in THE WRITER June 2004