Knowing How to Give Water to Thirsty Writers: Guest Post by Al DeCiccio

A Provost’s Confessional Vignette:

Once a Writing Center Worker Always a Writing Center Worker

I am pleased to offer you this guest post about the power of collaboration between writers by Dr. Al DeCiccio, Provost at Southern Vermont College, a scholar in Writing Center pedagogy, past president of the Writing Centers Association and former co-editor of The Writing Center Journal.

For more than 30 years, I have held the belief that writing centers are places where risk-taking occurs, where mistakes can be made safely, where learning from errors is encouraged (indeed fostered), where getting it right the first time is less important than learning while doing over time
 

Most recently, at Southern Vermont College where I am Provost, we have implemented a new curriculum, using Neal Lerner’s Idea of a Writing Laboratory. Essentially, our curricular orientation is exactly as I have stated above about writing centers. I offer this fact as a way to orient readers to the following vignette. I hope everyone will find it affirming and illustrative of the fact that one can take the person out of the writing center, but one can never take the writing center out of the person.
 

In 1987, he was an important university man, the kind of man who could determine your future. Chair of the English Department and, more importantly for me, Director of the Graduate Program, Bill asked some questions, making proclamations as well.

“You don’t really believe that this‘positive intervention’ and ‘collaborative learning’ works for all of the students we see today, do you? Half the freshmen can never be taught to write. And then you want the students helping other students, as tutors. That’s the blind leading the blind, don’t you agree? And if you do, what is the point of collaborative learning and of writing centers?”

There had been long pauses in my life before. When Dr. Barry, the doctor who would save my eye, asked me to count backwards from 100 while he gave me ether. Or when I realized I was going to be attacked by the German Shepard after I reached out my hand to pet him. (I still have scars above my left eye, the one Dr. Barry saved, the one with no sight, the one close friends call goofy.) Or when I saw I was about to ride up the rear end of an Oldsmobile on the brand new bike my father bought me. (The look on my dad’s face when I walked the broken bike home was more disappointment than I could ever conceive of causing.)

This was another such pause.

I thought about how far away Tempe was from Lawrence and about how little this important university man knew of teaching writing and what it meant for those who learned to teach others how to do it well. Ten years later, Stephen King, of all people, gave the best advice about teaching writing: “Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up” (On Writing 270).

I thought of Frost, who was from Lawrence; I thought of John D’Agata, who is from Lawrence. Bill was far removed in space and in time from the kind of great writing these men produced.

I thought of Michael Struffolino. I thought of Tania Guimond. They were student-tutors, one a self-proclaimed Libertarian and the other had the warmest heart I’ve ever known even if she couldn’t spell a lick. They were terrific tutors; they knew how to give water to thirsty writers.

They worked and studied at Merrimack College, in the greatest writing center still (and I’ve signed the wall of Purdue’s Writing Lab and seen the Stanford Writing Center, close by Andrea Lunsford’s office filled with writing on collaborative learning and tiny red shoes). Michael and Tania knew Lawrence, too.

It was a hard, working-class place, but it was a city of families and neighborhoods; it wasn’t one fashioned after other cities. It didn’t sneer.

Finally, I answered Bill, realizing that I would make my line in the sand.“Well, unless someone is born with an intellectual disability,” I started out, “I think everybody can learn to write.”

“I think this dissertation looks really good. Did you write it on a computer?” The committee member speaking now tried to loosen the moment’s tightness by this left-handed compliment.

 

“Yes, I did, a Mac 520. But to answer Bill’s question, when writers work together, they gain a momentum that is truly inspiring. A power coming all over them with words. There is evidence, as I have suggested, which explains this power and how collaborative learning brings about knowledge and social growth for both the tutor and the tutee.”

 

 

“Well, it does look very nice--a sign of the times,” said the young professor on the committee, trying again to make things less tense.

 

“Thank you,” I said to the young professor. “Bill,” I continued to address him,“I would never (nor would you, if you knew them) call Tania or Michael or any of my tutors blind. That’s the whole point of collaborative learning and peer tutoring: when like-minded people work on a task that’s too hard for one of them to complete alone, together, they complete it efficiently and effectively. Heck, my whole dissertation was revised in Atlanta by people who know writing, who worked in a writing center--people who knew that, by helping me, I would get the dissertation done and to get back to my writing center tutors.”

“Now, thank you, Al,” my advisor said.“We’re going to deliberate a little and we’ll talk to you after that. Please wait in the conference room.”

When the committee members called me in again, they did approve my dissertation, grudgingly. They wanted major revisions. I suspect they would have preferred a rhetorical analysis of “Billy Budd,” because Bill was a Melville scholar and writing centers, peer tutors, the social construction of knowledge, and collaborative learning were still far out alternatives.

I completed the revisions. While I have never been thrilled with the dissertation, I was always pleased with my writing center work, particularly while at Merrimack and with the peer tutors I knew there. I’ve learned from many good people through the years (Kenneth Bruffee, Bonnie Sunstein, Harvey Kail, Judith Stanford, Mickey Harris, Peter Elbow, Lisa Ede, Michael Rossi, Kathy Cain, Lil Brannon, Don Murray, and more). Still, none of them taught me as much as the tutors did about collaboration and compassion and the power of those actions.

 

I return to those lessons all the time in my position now. I am proud to think about and use what I learned about writing centers, peer tutoring, collaborative learning, and the justification of belief. As I have done for the past 20 years, I use the experience of the Merrimack College Writing Center in every budget decision I make, in every hiring decision I make, in every curricular decision I make, and in every interaction I have with my colleagues.





Photo of Al DeCiccio

Though I am no longer at Merrimack, I can still see Frost’s bust on that campus and hear the last couplet of “The Tuft of Flowers”: “‘Men [and women] work together,’ I told him from the heart,/‘Whether they work together or apart.’”

 

Poetry and the Ant Tracks of Writing

torbakhopper
 

This post is my musing about the workshop, "Your Ability to Write a Poem is Always Present," I'll be giving next Friday for the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. 

Is poetry different when it comes to mindful writing?
 

Any act of writing leads to a structure that can be quite different from ordinary spoken language. It's different because of that intricate use of time to create the text (those unseen ant tracks made by the author, the recursive nature of writing/revising/editing/writing/etc.) The time factor of literacy allows us to rework our language, adjust our phrases, make changes without a listener standing around, waiting for us. We have the leisure to tinker, to be by ourselves and our words.

To some extent, because of those ant tracks, all writing (no matter the genre) has captured the intrapersonal dynamic and the privacy inherent to writing. This happens even if only for a few seconds, as when composing an email that's immediately sent. As long as there's the capacity to delete & edit & add before another person encounters your words, the chance for internal dialog arises. This is part of the Present moment of writing.

The use of page space and line breaks--as well as the typical brevity of a poem in contrast to other types of writing--make poetry much more about those omissions, those silences, those big phrases of privacy. The intrapersonal dynamic is heightened with the genre of poetry.

We're also much more likely to think of a poem as a system of sounds (and thus occurring in time) than other genres. This helps accentuate the Present moment.

Mindfulness has the potential to alter the nature of our internal communication. By training in mindfulness practice, we become more aware of that internal dialog. So does the writing of poetry: it can alter our internal dialog by drawing our attention to it.

In fact, if you want to become a more mindful writing, no matter what genre you consider to be your mainstay, no matter if you are a novelist or even a blogger, trying out poetry can help develop your awareness.

 

Portrait of a Paragraph: One Strategy to Build Voice

jmussoto/Picasso

One thing that's struck me about voice-in-writing over the years is how little theory or practice has been developed around how to construct a voice.

Theorists debate whether voice is invoked, the extent to which voice is in response to a particular (real or imagined audience), and so forth. Categories of voice--such as real or dead--have been established. But must writers resort to chance to build a voice?

Pushing aside the issue of whether the voice we hear from the page of a dynamic author is actually microphone feedback from our own intrapersonal babble, I do think there are real ways to go about constructing voice. Voice has to be at least in part due to structural choices, and one of the main choices involves sentence length and sentence type.

Sentence length and sentence type (which is dictated by the punctuation used) constitute the skeleton of every text. Word-free, they nevertheless play a powerful role in the rhythm and voice of a passage.

A device I've shown students is called "Portrait of a Paragraph." It involves taking a passage from a text and drawing lines  __________________  for where language occurs and then placing punctuation exactly where it falls in those lines. 

Punctuation including commas, semicolons, colons, periods, dashes, exclamation marks, parenthesis, and question marks should be captured in the portrait. 

This should be done almost mindlessly with little attention to the meaning or words of the text. 

For example, here is a Portrait of a Paragraph of my previous passage, up above, the one starting "Sentence length":

Sentence length and sentence type (which is dictated by the punctuation used) constitute the skeleton of every text. Word-free, they nevertheless play a powerful role in the rhythm and voice of a passage.

__________________________  ( _____________________

_______) ________________________.   ________, __________

___________________________________________________ . 


If you draw a portrait of a longer passage, you can see the structural reasons which cause that voice or the lack of an interesting voice.

For instance, if you can circle many of the punctuation choices making a sort of vertical entry in a crossword puzzle--if, in other words, the punctuation roughly lines up--then you know you have identified one of the reasons for monotone.

If the sentences are extremely long but nevertheless grammatically accurate statements (with no commas and just end punctuation), you know that you are probably looking at an instruction manual or a bureaucratic document with little concern for the natural pauses of human breathing. (Why would such a document be concerned with our breathing? It doesn't want to appear to be spoken or made by a single author. Instead, it seeks to be anonymous and almost machine-made.)

So look for similarities and patterns in sentence lengths and punctuation choices. These frequently indicate a text with little voice.

On the other hand, variation in lengths and punctuation better resemble spoken speech. These occurrences indicate a text with voice.

If you want to practice developing voice through attention to structural concerns, pick a passage by an author, one full of voice. Do the Portrait. Then try to write something of your own that follows the same sentence length and punctuation choices.

You can also do a Portrait of a Paragraph on one of your own drafts and make changes based on what you notice about voice.

Tasting Your Voice

Hamed Saber

"There is writing in my voice, and voice in my writing." -Overheard at an open-mike poetry event

Why even talk about writing or writers as having “voice”? I’ve been thinking of this in light of some of the readings my graduate students are preparing this week—articles such as Irvin Hashimoto’s “Voice as Juice: Some Reservations about Evangelical Composition” which disparage voice, at least as discussed by Peter Elbow and process-minded individuals.

To skeptics, voice-in-writing sounds like some sort of MFA program gimmick at best or else as a fool-hearty worship of the individual-as-artist. Others, like Hashimoto, see voice as a nebulous, anti-intellectual concept used by writing instructors for questionable purposes: “the term ‘voice’ may have become nothing more than a vague phrase conjured up by English teachers to impress and motivate the masses to write more, confess more, and be happy.”

But voice is more than “being original”—as in “she’s an original voice in contemporary American fiction.” Voice isn’t always so ego-laden. It doesn’t have to be about possessing some sort of uniqueness (like a fingerprint or DNA code) that becomes one’s good fortune in that it manages to make one attractive to readers.

In fact, there are quite a few noteworthy reasons to take voice-in-writing seriously. (I’ll talk about one here and others in a later post.)

Voice isn’t the claim receipt for originality. Instead, it comes down to tasting and hearing one’s own voice as one writes.

Being able to just notice one’s voice—no matter its quality—as one writes indicates that one is mindfully writing.

It’s as Walter Ong says in his marvelous book Orality and Literacy: if you see the water buffalo, that’s one thing, but if you hear the water buffalo, that’s entirely another thing. You’d better watch out! Sound means something is not static; to hear means presence and the possibility for engagement. Voice-in-writing is the activation of time.

There’s a sensory, real-time experience to writing, and hearing one’s writing (the inner vocalization as one forms words) is part of it. Voice is tied to the present moment of writing.

As you write, if you remain mindful, you hear your words echoing and refracting and then stabilizing in your own head—at a pace and in a condition that’s different probably from your normal speaking voice—but nevertheless recognizable as how you sound. You also feel the sensations of typing, of contact with plastic keys, of the movement of your finger bones, the hula-dancing of your wrists.

You might even be able to taste your voice—the after-image of the morning’s bitter coffee, the contact your tongue makes with the Stonehenge arrangement of different teeth, or how the tongue presses in calm moments at the back of certain teeth (you’re breathing through your nose)—like a shy child pressing into its parents legs.

When you write, if you can hear your voice, it means you are present. Voice-in-writing signals that something is happening in time and that you are sufficiently aware enough to witness it: moment to moment, word to word.

The Thing Itself: Second Guest Post by Keith Hjortshoj

rumpleteaser

Keith Hjortshoj has sent along this follow-up post to his one earlier in the month.

“Performance, in which the whole fate and terror rests, is another matter.”


This sobering statement lands at the end of James Agee’s “Preamble” to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, following several pages of invective against publishers and readers who would fail to be moved, he predicted, by the realities of the fragile, damaged lives he tried to document. In this sentence Agee acknowledges, in the end, that the failure to live up to his intentions would also be his own, or that of language itself.

This fear afflicts all of us who write not just for ourselves but to and for others: that the products of our work will be unclear, misunderstood, misjudged, for reasons we can’t entirely control. And these doubts about the future of the product affect the process of writing, in the present.

In an earlier post I argued that while we are doing it, “writing” (as a verb) results from embodied movement and therefore from release into motion, not from control. When we include the dimension of audience, however, this first release is followed by another: the release of this “writing” (now as a noun and object) into the hands and minds of readers, where it begins a life of its own.

Most of our anxieties about this first release, in the process of writing, are really about the second: the quality and fate of the product when it moves beyond us. The desire to control its fate, or the fear that we can’t, makes release feel like a loss of control. Like helicopter parents, we are really trying to control in the present what will happen to this child in the future, when we “let go” and she has to face the world on her own. To those who care about their writing (or their children), we can’t argue that such fears are irrational. After all, as a young Marxist, Agee was most afraid that readers would view his book as “art” or “literature”; and that’s precisely what they did.

This is another reason for which the advice “Just write!” seems naïve or insufficient. For writers who have reason to worry about the fate of the product, it sounds like “Don’t care!” These things we produce do eventually represent us in various ways, with real consequences. Clearer advice, perhaps, is, “Don’t confuse the first release with the second, the process with the product.” The delay between them, in writing, buys you freedom and time, and concerns about the way the writing will strike the reader are the work of revision.

But there’s something else about this product and “performance” that unsettles us. Writing fixes language to the page, in a certain order, and when it’s released to the audience that order, now an object, becomes unalterable. If the act of writing is an embodied dance between language and thought, the dance then seems to be over. The product of this movement appears to be a static, skeletal rendition of the life that went into it: a frozen artifact of once fluid thoughts and intentions.

Perhaps this is why academic writers and their teachers, especially, become so obsessed with the formal, structural features of writing—with its organization, logical order, and “positions.” If writing (the noun) is an open window to the mind, as they tend to believe, they want to be properly dressed and posed for the occasion. Schematic outlines, notes, and other preparations for the performance might get their disheveled thoughts and words in order. And this is why academic writing is so often taught like anatomy rather than like dance, or music.

What we tend to forget, and therefore lose control over, is the way this language will continue to move, in the minds of readers, as a living thing. What continues to dance across that spatial and temporal divide, between the act of writing and the act of reading, is the sound of the human voice. When writers are tense, embroiled in structure, inattentive to their own voices, distrusting language itself, we can hear that too. That’s the uniquely human miracle of writing, so improbable that we can’t quite believe it ourselves. And it’s a dimension of writing that Peter Elbow examined closely in his essay “The Music of Form.”

Even James Agee, of all people, didn’t quite believe it. He wanted to make language record actualities, like a multisensory camera, and was afraid that he couldn’t. But what really comes across that divide, between his moving experience of Alabama and our eyes and ears moving across the pages of his book, decades later, is his own voice: his anger, empathy, and remorse, and his astonishing ability to ignite our own imaginations on behalf of others: “so that, wherever the weathers of the year have handled it, the wood of the whole of this house shines with the noble gentleness of cherished silver, much as where (yet differently), along the floors, in the pathings of millions of soft wavelike movements of naked feet, it can be still more melodiously charmed upon its knots, and is as wood long fondled in a tender sea:”

Rolling and unfolding in the living rhythms of his voice, the resonance of one body in another, the beauty of Agee’s performance lies in the gorgeous failure of his intentions. Of course we read it as “art,” in the deepest and most human sense of the word, because that (like it or not) is what writing is. Defying time and space, as Eliot wrote, “My voice echoes/ Thus in your mind.”

Another Day, Another Fail

Identity

Taped to the lid of my laptop in my study is a Post-It which says “Another Day, Another Fail.” I imagine that someone seeing this Post-It, someone who knows I am a writer, might find this overly pessimistic. Why point to failure? Shouldn’t you be warding it off?

 

Instead of pessimistic, “Another Day, Another Fail” feels joyous to me—a real celebration of the potential of any given moment. It’s an acknowledgement of groundlessness or the constant change of experience and that nothing is permanent—including  success or failure at writing. During a lunch break in my scholarly rewriting on the back porch last summer, I overheard a scientist on NPR talking about how for many, many days he would go to his lab, run the experiment, only to have it fail. “Another day, another fail,” he evenly stated. Of course, he kept going, and eventually, he did obtain interesting results, and something did develop, but it wasn’t guaranteed.

 

 

“Another Day, Another Fail” is an equalizer. It puts the same weight on “day” as it does on “fail.” Each moment arises fresh, anew. A moment passes: it contains failure. So what? Another moment arrives. It’s the avoidance of predetermined thought. I try to avoid predicting or evaluating the outcome of a writing session before it begins. If I don’t write a single word, so be it. If I write a ton, so be it.

In “Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting,” Peter Elbow points to this need to let go of outcome: “In our culture, mastery and control are deeply built into our model of writing. From freewriting I learn how writing can, in contrast, involve passivity, an experience of nonstriving, unclenching, letting go, or opening myself up.”  

To work without expectation, that is the discipline of mindful writing. Or more precisely, to work without any expectation concerning outcome or product (and this is one alignment between mindfulness and process pedagogy). The one expectation is that one keeps trying—that one has a writing discipline. Along the same lines, Mike Rose, in his wonderful early article, “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language,” describes how “unstuck” students were the ones who maintained fluid rules for writing—except for the rule that they would keep trying.

This mindset of openness to the experience prevents suffering in the Buddhist sense of clinging to what is pleasant (a good writing session, an acceptance notification, praise). For me, staying open to the moment is its own reward, is a source of energy, causes a good day for writing. To stay open to the moment is a form of acceptance that can be just as gratifying (well, almost…I admit it, I admit it) as an acceptance note from an editor.

What sort of invention strategy based on groundlessness and acceptance could you imagine for your own writing?  What would that writing session look like?

Guest Post by Keith Hjortshoj

Kevin Dooley

What are you actually doing? 

I am grateful that Keith Hjortshoj has given his thoughts to this blog. Keith's book,Overcoming Writing Blocks,has been seminal to my understanding of writing blocks and very insightful for my students. Dr. Hjortshoj is the John S. Knight Director of Writing in the Majors at Cornell University. He has published in Asian and Islamic studies in addition to Composition and Rhetoric.      

When I tell people that I teach writing as movement (or as “embodied movement”), I hope they won’t ask me what I mean, exactly. They rarely do. Perhaps that’s because the idea pleases them (they often smile when I say it) and rings true. We all want writing to feel more like dancing. Or perhaps the statement seems, in an oxymoronic way, vaguely obvious. When we write, after all, we are doing something, not just with our brains and our fingers but with our whole selves in space and time. And when people talk about this activity they use the language of movement. They say they got somewhere, that the project is moving along, or (if it isn’t) that they’re stuck, blocked, or running into trouble: not moving. They say that writing itself flows or is choppy, like moving water, or that it’s graceful or awkward. Writing can skitter across the page or plod along in dreary iambs, like a tired donkey. In fact it’s difficult to talk about real writing (as opposed to abstract plans for writing) without reference to motion.

 

If asked what I mean, I could just say that, honestly enough, and most people would be satisfied.

But I’m not, because the answers to the further questions they might have asked get very complicated, and I’m still in the process of figuring them out. What is moving, exactly? 

In some ways it’s the writer; in other ways it’s the writing, the language itself. And although these kinds of movement, of people and of texts, are related, they aren’t the same. Through coordinated movement of the embodied mind (self), sentences and passages move along the page and resonate, for readers, with qualities of a living voice now detached from the writer (who is doing something else). But we can’t reduce either of these dimensions of writing to the other. And when writers and their writing run into trouble, these distinctions become important. Saying “Just do it!” rarely solves the problem.

An example will help to explain why.

A graduate student who met with me every week, while working on his dissertation, typically arrived with less than a page of handwritten draft that set off in an interesting direction but ended abruptly. When I asked Carl why he stopped, he said that he got “stuck,” uncertain or confused, and really felt he needed to do further reading before he could continue. But then his ideas changed, he started a new page, stopped again, reverted to reading and thinking . . .

On one level, the problem seems fairly simple. Becoming fainthearted, Carl made the common academic blunder of confusing actually writing with reading and thinking about writing—two very, different but also embodied activities that felt safer. So I could have explained that confusion each week and said, again, “Don’t stop writing!”

But these explanations didn’t help, and one day I asked Carl to tell me exactly what happened at the moment he stopped, because I noticed that his handwriting gradually deteriorated and trailed off. He said, “The pen falls out of my hand.” As his doubts about what he was saying accumulated, he explained, his hand became increasingly cramped until he couldn’t hold the pen, and this physical inability to continue told him he had to stop writing and read, both to rest his hand and to collect his thoughts: to restore the physical and mental composure necessary for composing. Just keep writing? He couldn’t. (Carl wrote with pen, I should mention, because typing was even more paralyzing.)

Dualistic thinking will now tempt us to conclude that what we thought was a psychological (cognitive or emotional) problem was really a physical one, such as “carpal tunnel syndrome.” Time for the writing teacher to recommend physical therapy?

Not if the therapy is confined to a wrist brace or a set of exercises. Carl’s hand was connected to the rest of him, including his mind. When his fingers tightened on the pen, this effort to coordinate language and thought—to fabricate the kind of writing he felt unworthy to produce—gripped his entire being. As his hand began to cramp, the fluency of his thought and his writing deteriorated as well. Which was the cause and which was the effect? It’s impossible to say, and pointless to try, because these dimensions of the self are inseparable.

But this doesn’t mean the problem is hopeless. With awareness that writing (like everything else we do) is psychophysical movement, we can address the problem from either direction, through release. “When I’m falling,” Willem de Kooning said, “I’m doing alright. . .I’m really slipping, most of the time, into that glimpse. I’m like a slipping glimpser.” Like painting and walking, writing is falling into empty space, with trust in a mysteriously familiar ability realized in motion. Like walking, writing always results, in the moment, from release, not from control. Preparing to take a step, getting your limbs in the right position, thinking about the right way to take this risk, is not walking. Release your mind, release your limbs, and you move. It doesn’t matter which way you release first.

What about that risk, and the need for preparation? For the purpose of writing, there’s nothing wrong with preparation—with reading, or with thinking about what you want to say. But preparing to write is not writing and doesn’t necessarily lead to writing, any more than preparing to walk will get you anywhere. And in the moment, there is no risk in writing. This is why William Stafford called writing “one of the great, free human activities.” While you are writing, no one else is actually reading, or judging, what you say, so you are free to say anything. It really is like dancing, at home alone, with the curtains drawn, when you can release your body, release your mind, and move. When you release, mindful of this freedom, you can just dance. When you release (not before) you can “Just write!”

How does writing itself move, beyond us? That’s another complicated puzzle and topic, perhaps, or another post.