Formatting Titles

Here is my latest podcast: Formatting Titles

Audience and Purpose Podcast

Hi all,

Click this link for my latest podcast: Audience and Purpose Podcast

Effective Writing: Clarity

Here is a new podcast! http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3904846/Clear%20Writing%20Poadcast.mp3 (audio only)

It's/Its Rhyme

In this podcast, I use voice and images to share a writing tip that concerns confusion with it's and its.

To watch and listen to the podcast, click this link: It's/Its Rhyme

Red Ink and Correction Marks

Hi All,

I've decided to try a podcast for this entry. In this podcast, I talk about how an unpleasant experience in a high school English class helped to inform the teaching pedagogy I would adopt later in life. To listen to the podcast click Red Ink and Correction Marks.


Enjoy!

Kurtis

First Assignment

When I was twenty, I decided I wanted to be a writer. To get some practical, professional experience, I began writing for my college’s student newspaper. This was before word processing, when the latest technology was an electric typewriter with auto-correct. For me, the writing was done on a manual typewriter, a Smith Corona with a worn out S key that my father had used when he attended Pennsylvania Military College three decades earlier. The typewriter clipped into a hard tan case that locked and had a rugged handle for easy portability. With case, the typewriter weighed over ten pounds.

My first weeks at the newspaper were unremarkable. I did some copy editing, made a few fact-check calls, and wrote an opinion piece on a subject I don’t recall but which ended with a cliché, something that brought the ire of the assistant editor, a senior English major who snapped her lips and told me never to use clichés and never ever to end an essay with one. The highlight up to that point had been a late Friday afternoon meeting during which several staff writers produced six packs of beer from paper bags.

Then I got my first assignment. I was to cover a Ku Klux Klan rally and the subsequent protest of that rally in the small mill town of Rumford, an hour away. The Klan, I learned, was on a recruiting mission in this unlikely of places in Maine and found a farmer willing to hold the event on his property. As part of the press, I had credentials that allowed me entry onto the private property so that I could attend a press conference by a Klan representative.

At the time, I was politically active and had I not been covering the story would surely have been one of the protesters. I had been an adamant opponent of Citibank’s investment in South Africa under its apartheid system and had even been arrested outside a local branch with a host of others for refusing to stop reading the names of blacks killed under the apartheid government. One summer I canvassed for Greenpeace and grew accustomed to the malcontent and misunderstanding of so many. I had been questioned by police, ridiculed by homeowners, and in one instance chased off by an angry husband upset at his wife’s twenty-five dollar tax-deductible contribution.

The Klan rally occurred on a Saturday in early November on the outskirts of the town, where yellowing fields dipped and rolled west toward the White Mountains thirty miles in the distance. The road in followed the Androscoggin River, then snaked along winding country roads. I ended up making the trip alone and when I arrived the flashing blue lights of the Maine State Police greeted me. Protesters, I was told, were relegated to a field across the street from the rally, which was being held on private property . Trespassers, I was warned, would be prosecuted. “That’s ok,” I said, flashing my press card. “I’m here to cover the story. “

The mood in the field was restless. By 11 AM the crowd had swelled to about two hundred. Shortly before noon, the organizers of the protest arrived with signs, a bullhorn, and an agenda. Within thirty minutes, the quiet pockets of mostly college-aged students had banded together and were shouting “Not here Klan! Not here Klan!” One of the organizers, a slight gray-bearded man wearing a faded jean jacket and a Jesse Jackson for president pin, was talking in earnest to one of the troopers. The man was adamant that the police had no right to restrict where the protesters gathered so long as they weren’t creating a safety hazard and stayed off the private property. Before too long, much of the crowd in the field was across the street in front of the farmhouse and the shouts of “Go home Klan! Go home Klan!” continued.

I am not sure what law enforcement had expected from the gathering, but in no time, another State Trooper was on the scene along with two cars from the sheriff’s office. I was standing near the driveway on the road side of the yellow police tape that spanned the length of the property. About thirty yards in stood a barn, where inside I could see men milling about. As the crowd got louder, several men emerged from the barn and came to the end of the gravel driveway. If they were Klansmen, I do not know, but they were clearly on edge. One man shouted at the crowd to shut up and go back home; he spat on the ground and laughed. “Keep it up,” he said.

The press conference took place in the barn at 2 PM. I don’t know what I expected (Klansmen in robes?), but what transpired was ordinary. The press asked questions and a lone man who would not say if he was in the Klan or not responded. He did say that members of the Klan would appear in the evening for a ceremony and we were all welcome to attend. The whole press conference lasted maybe twenty minutes and before I knew it, I was back out with the crowd.

Three images stand out from this experience. First, the crowd. As much as I oppose everything the Ku Klux Klan stands for, the crowd, if not antagonistic, was provoking. They jeered at anyone who appeared on the property. A man yelled through a bullhorn, “Go home Klan! Go home Klan!” which the crowed repeated, over and over again. Some yelled incendiary remarks. They gestured. The police did little to control the crowd and what I remember most now is how tense the situation became. Perhaps the tenseness was due to the number of protestors, the lack of sufficient crowd control, or both. Perhaps the protesters should have been made to stay across the road. I am not sure. What I am sure about, though, is that I can understand how situations can quickly turn to something ugly.

In fact, things did get ugly, which is the second image that stands out. At some point a car tried to turn onto the property, but the crowd refused to move. A trooper intervened and the crowd slowly dispersed but not without one or two banging the roof of the car and intense yelling. I had no idea who was in the car, but once it made its way down the driveway to the barn, two young men and a young woman emerged. The woman, who could have been just another brown-haired college student, was visibly upset and, turning to the crowd, raised her middle finger, which brought boos and catcalls and even louder yelling of “Go home Klan! Go home Klan!” Suddenly, from inside the barn, a man emerged running toward the crowd with a rifle raised in his hand. The man’s jaw was tight and his eyes narrow and as he got closer, I realized it was the same man from earlier who told the crowd to “Keep it up.” The rifle was never lowered or aimed at the crowd and two troopers quickly came between the man and the crowd. “That was my daughter!” he yelled. “You’ve got no right!”

The last image, the one most frightening, took place after dark when I witnessed six hooded figures emerge from the barn and proceed onto a grassy knoll in a side field and burn a cross. Not many of the protesters remained and those that did said little. We all stood silently at the edge of the gravel driveway watching those six ghostly figures and the burning cross.

Reading on the Road

In the spring of 1988, I got married and, instead of a traditional honeymoon, spent the next four months vagabonding through Europe with my wife, Ann. We were both twenty-three, young by today’s standards to marry, but we were in love and ready for adventure. One of the great things about travelling and flitting about from one place to the next was the time available to read. These were the days before cell phones and texting, before iPods and ear buds, before everyone toted laptops like extra necessary appendages. I am not sure the times were simpler, but you certainly had a kind of freedom and anonymity, a sense of being out there all by yourself, unheard of in the Facebook era.

We flew into Heathrow where an English friend picked us up and whisked us to her flat on the outskirts of London. During our stay, I finished reading On the Road, not the first time I had read the book, but what could be better than reading On the Road while on the road? I fancied myself a European Sal Paradise.

Jayne-Anne, our friend, gave us each a book at the end of our stay—The Complete Sherlock Holmes and Graham Greene’s Brighten Rock. The books came right off her bookcase. Since Ann had already read On the Road and Jayne-Anne hadn’t, we passed on the book to her—and thus began months of reading and trading books with others we met on our travels, all of which I recorded in my daily journal.

While hitchhiking through Ireland, we got stranded in the rain with Christoph, a not yet twenty-year-old German who was tooling about before beginning his mandatory civil service to his country. One night in a Galway pub, we got to talking about literature and Christoph sang the praises of a German author I’d never heard of—Heinrich Boll. We travelled about a week with Christoph, including a few days in Dublin, where we slept on the floor in the flat of Frank O’Rielly, a friend of an American friend of mine. When Ann and I departed for France via ferry, Christoph saw us off and presented us with a pristine copy of Heinrich Boll’s 18 Stories, which I still have.

In Carcassonne, a medieval walled city in France, we befriended an old French street artist named Savigon, who ranted about Rimbaud and Camus and existentialism. He couldn’t say enough about Kafka and Dostoevsky. On the day Ann and I left, we purchased one of Savigon’s line drawings, and in addition to the art, he gave us a tattered copy of Camus’ The Fall (in English!). I’ve since read my way through all of Camus and Dostoevsky and Kafka, and I can’t say that I don’t think of the ranting Savigon whenever I think of those authors.

In Switzerland, I traded The Fall for Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. On a train to Italy, I traded Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to an American couple from Seattle for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. All through Europe this kind of exchange went on and I read and read. Dracula. Ironweed. The Monkey Wrench Gang. Sometimes a Great Notion. Breakfast of Champions. It was wondrous. On my twenty-fourth birthday, my wife gave me Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveller. In Zagreb, which at the time was in the country of Yugoslavia, I learned of Ivo Andric and purchased a copy of The Pasha’s Concubine and Other Tales in an English bookshop.

Despite the weight they added to my backpack, I kept some of the books from those travels, but the majority I passed along because it was the most economical way to get “new” books and a great way to meet people. I don’t know how many years it would have taken me to discover Boll or Andric, or to realize just how much I enjoy the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. To this day, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock remains one of the most gripping books I’ve ever read.

I am not sure when I’ll get a chance to travel and read the way I did twenty-odd years ago, but when the day comes, I will dust off On the Road and be on my way.

Fabulous Realities

I live in a small town in the country. The sticks according to city friends. The middle of nowhere according to my eleven-year-old daughter. The town has one blinking red traffic light at a “tricky” intersection. There are two corner stores, no restaurants, and one bar—the Red-Neck Lounge. Last year during American Idol, the Red-Neck Lounge held its own weekly talent competition aptly named Red-Neck Idol. As much as I wanted to see what went on inside, I couldn’t muster the courage to check out Red-Neck Idol. Maybe this year.

As a writer, I am always looking for material. When an opportunity knocks, I want to open the door, pen in hand. I tell my students always to have their radar on for potential material, and I live by that advice. What I am looking for is what Ken MacRorie calls fabulous realities—images and talk and situations that are wholly unexpected and unique, yet there they are, knocking at the door.

I encountered a fabulous reality just the other morning at the garage where I took my 1987 Ford pick-up for its annual inspection (it didn’t pass, but that’s another story). I’d been taking my truck to this garage for the past few years and knew the two mechanics by first name, Scott and Donny. On this particular morning, the tiny office was full of people—Scott and Donny, of course, and two others whom I knew immediately were related to Donny. Donny’s a skinny man in his late thirties with thick, tinted glasses that made the whites of his eyes gray. A little red hair grew on the end of his chin, which he rubbed often. He spoke slow and moved slower, but he was a good mechanic and trustworthy.

Because my truck was in the garage often enough that Donny felt he knew me, he introduced me to the other two in the room. “This is my father, Donny,” he said pointing to the older man, “and this is my son, Donny,” he said, pointing to a teenager. He didn’t smile when he said this, so I knew he wasn’t joking, and he might not have even seen the obvious humor in the situation—Donny, Donny, and Donny.

Scott, the owner of the garage, smiled and said, “Confused yet?”

I laughed and immediately thought of the sitcom The Bob Newhart Show, in which two of Bob’s neighbors are brothers named Daryl and Daryl.

“How do you keep it straight?” I asked Donny. My Donny.

Donny nudged up his glasses and said, “Easy. This is Donny senior. I’m Donny junior, and this is Donny junior junior.

I don’t recall what I ended up having to pay to get my truck repaired, but whatever it was, it surely was worth it. I mean, Donny, Donny, and Donny is one thing, but Donny senior, Donny junior, and Donny junior junior is quite another. I couldn’t make something like that up if I wanted to. Which is why it is a fabulous reality.

On Reading

I can still recall, nearly eighteen years ago, a pretty young woman with blue eyes and blonde hair taking my creative writing class who, despite her budding talent as a writer, confessed she did not enjoy reading. “You don’t like to read?” I said. “Then how can you be a writer?” She had stopped me after class and wanted to know my “honest opinion” of her ability. We talked and eventually I asked her what authors she liked to read. “Actually,” she said, “I don’t like to read. All I want to do is write.”

Flash forward almost two decades and her pronouncement still jars me: I don’t like to read.  How can this be? It’s like being a musician yet disliking music. Or being a fish but not liking water. Huh? It’s just not possible. 

Many years ago, I took a fiction writing class with Monica Wood (http://monicawood.com/), who told us that she considered it her job as a writer to read. She said that she read every day without fail. Indeed! Reading—reading carefully—can be incredibly instructive to one’s own writing. A writer’s job should be to read. The careful reader, of course, can learn a lot about writing by reading. I’ve learned from the greats—Chekov, Fitzgerald, and Flannery O’Connor. Tolstoy. I learned the art of stringing along a sentence by reading Faulkner. I learned how to write tight courtesy Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. Poe taught me a lot about imagery and atmosphere. The list goes on.

Some books and stories I’ve read over and over again. The Great Gatsby. The Catcher in the Rye. “Hills Like White Elephants.” “Sonny’s Blues.” No matter how many times I read The Great Gatsby, I notice something new. The book continues to surprise me. Such is the nature of great literature.

Over the years, I’ve amassed a good collection of books. Standing in my home office, I am surrounded by books, mostly fiction but also art books and history books and books about writing. Reading has always given me great satisfaction and comfort. It’s been a source of delight and nourishment and inspiration. It’s helped me see my world, perhaps understand it a little better, and it has helped me connect with my craft, with writing, and that has made all the difference in my life. 

Getting It All Down

I used to write down everything. Random thoughts, fragmentary ideas, first lines for stories, names, observations, images, plotlines, interesting bits I culled from newspapers and magazines, titles, overheard dialog, inspiring quotes—anything that I thought would help me with my writing. I wrote on torn pieces of paper, napkins, matchbooks, cardboard, newspaper, cereal box tops, and even the back of my hand. When I got wiser, I used tiny spiral-bound notebooks, filling one after the other. If something came to me, I recorded it. For years I was relentless in my recording. I filled desk drawers, file folders, and shoe boxes with scraps of paper and little notebooks. Once, I tried organizing the scraps by taping them into composition notebooks. I took the time to number pages and create a table of contents for each of my seven notebooks. I tried grouping like items together. My attempts at organizing the content were, at times, fanatical. (I am by nature obsessive-compulsive.) In the end, though, my efforts proved futile as finding anything was an exercise in patience. Too often I was taken out of the writing moment, flipping notebook pages for something that I knew I recorded. At some point I gave up, packed the notebooks in a box, labeled it accordingly, then lugged it up to the attic with other boxes containing stuff that I no longer used but still wanted to keep.

I’ve always admired writers who kept notebooks. James Joyce kept one. So did Hemingway. Kerouac. I knew a guy who filled so many notebooks that stacked on top of one another they reached the ceiling. Of course I like the idea of a notebook, getting it all down. But what about making use of what one writes down? That’s always been my problem—at least at a certain point.

Recently I discovered a piece of software (for while my writing everything down has waned, my quest to figure out a way to organize it all has not) called Evernote (www.evernote.com). Evernote is an electronic note-keeping program that allows one to organize notes in any number of ways (how my mind works, for example) and—best of all—allows one to search content. Say I have an idea for a story in January. I can write that idea down and give it a tag like “story idea” and maybe add another tag like “winter.” In July when the muse strikes, I may want to pursue that winter story idea—and Evernote gives me an easy way to find that idea. What’s even better is that Evernote works on any computer as well as smartphones and iPod touches. The content is stored in the clouds enabling me to synch notes from one device to the next. Slick!

While I don’t know what kind of effect my new method of recording my thoughts and ideas will have on my writing, I can say that I am slowly getting back into the swing of getting it all down.

Why Writing Matters

For about ten years, I conducted a little experiment in my freshman composition courses on the first day of the semester. Standing before the wide-eyed group and posturing myself as professorial as possible (I probably even wore a tweed sport coat), I posed this question: Why does writing matter?

I’d waggle a finger in the air and add, “I don’t want you to answer this question - it’s rhetorical. Just think about an answer.” I’d pivot and pace across the front of the room noticing out of the corner of my eye one or two eager beavers reaching for their college-level dictionaries (required) and thumb quickly for “rhetorical.” The others sat slack-jawed and glazy-eyed.

I instructed the students to rip a piece of paper into fourths and write on one the name of a vegetable they couldn’t stomach, on another a movie they hated, on the third a rule or law they thought was inane (probably not the word I used in class), and on the last the word they used for their mother or someone they loved deeply.

“Take the piece of paper in which you have written the name of a vegetable you can’t stand, drop it on the floor, and stamp all over it,” I instructed. Blank stares and a smattering of nervous is-he-serious laughter filled the room. “Go ahead,” I cajoled. “It’s ok.” And they did it, reluctantly at first, but soon with growing enthusiasm as if to say, Hey! College is fun!

They stomped all over the cauliflower and turnips and broccoli. They loosened up and some smiled when they stamped their feet on the movies they hated. Most delighted in their perceived rebellious behavior of trampling out a rule or law they thought was stupid. Then I paused. The brighter students knew what was coming next (they were almost always the ones who had reached for the dictionaries earlier). I asked the students to hold up the piece of paper they had written the name they use for their mother or someone they loved deeply. For theatrics, I sometimes asked students to share those names. Mom, Mommy, Mommy Dearest.

“Ok,” I said. “You know what to do - stomp on those papers!” Almost always the students hesitated, looked up, offered furtive glances around the room, occasionally someone remarked, and then slowly the students dropped the slips of paper onto the floor and half-hearted stepping, not stomping, ensued.

Then we started talking. “Why did it matter?” I asked. “It’s just a word.”

To most of the students (the vast majority over the years, I imagine), my antics put me in the category of loopy English professor, another talking head trying to convince non-believers of the merits of what I did - the teaching of writing. But to some, maybe only one in a class if I was lucky, what I did helped them connect with something that simply made sense in their eighteen-year-old minds.

Words have power. Writing matters. Writing enables us to express our thoughts and ideas, and it helps us understand ourselves, our lives, and our world. Writing allows us to make connections, to organize our thinking and to sort the fact from the fancy. Writing creates a record that lasts. Writing is empowering in that it enables us to communicate with others. If writing didn’t matter, then we might as well be stomping on our mothers.

Why Blog?

I have never been a dedicated blogger, never had my own blog, and never blogged on any kind of regular basis. But that’s all going to change. Starting now. Call this a new year’s resolution. Up to now, the biggest challenge was not so much a focus for my blog, but, rather, a title for my blog. I knew I wanted to blog about writing, but every title I came up with was taken, even the one I was most partial to: Just Another Writing Blog. After all, a quick Google search will yield a gazillion blogs about writing. Wow, I thought, how was I going to come up with a unique title? Then it hit me: WOW! W. O. W. Writing on writing. Talk about serendipity. Wow!

For years while teaching creative writing, I required students to keep a journal to warehouse their ideas for stories and poems and essays. Each week they dutifully composed entries and several times during the semester, I collected and read the journals. The problem I saw, year after year, was that the entries, even for the better students, became lackluster, perfunctory. They were recorded for the sake of recording them. I have long ago abandoned writing regularly in a journal for the same basic reason—no real audience. The words lived and died within the covers of the journal, forever private.

Blogging has changed all that. No longer are one’s words left in the proverbial writer’s drawer. For better or for worse, anyone’s words can join the wonderful cacophony of other voices in the bloggersphere. The potential for a readership exists with others who have similar interests, and even though we writers still write alone, we can all easily become part of a larger community and perhaps find greater purpose in what we put down in words.