Encouragement

Hi, folks! No, this blog isn't abandoned, just going through a dry spell. I've been working a lot (I put in eleven hours at the bakery today). Once I get my class finished up next week and slog through my first 40-hour work week at the cafe, I'll surely be on track!

I've had some good news this week: The Raven Chronicles, a literary magazine based in Seattle, Washington, nominated one of my poems for a Pushcart Prize! I'm very, very excited about it, and so proud that they thought my poem worthy of being one of the few they nominated in 2010.

It's given me a big boost of confidence when I've been feeling low about my writing. I've managed to write about one poem a month since I've been out of grad school, and I haven't even revised those. I've been seriously doubting my commitment to poetry, but this nomination has made me feel rejuvenated and ready to gear up for another round of poem submissions. So watch out Post Office--I'm headed your way with a big stack of manilla envelopes!

I recently stumbled across Kate Monahan's blog MFA Confidential. In her most recent post, she writes about the vital importance of encouragement in a writer's life. I completely agree with her: I remember every single time that a professor, workshop member, or friend told me that, yes, I could do this, that I could write something worthwhile. And every time it's happened, it's come at just the right time, just when I felt like giving up.

Monahan quotes Anatole France at the end of her post: “Nine tenths of education is encouragement." I believe that this is absolutely true, especially when teaching writing. I've made the decision to never tell a writer "No" in workshop, and I would never tell a beginning composition writer "No" as they worked on a paper, nor would I tell a beginning reader of literature "No" when they first start trying to interpret a short story. I've seen enough students come into my classroom morose and unwilling, convinced that they "are just no good at writing." They cannot learn if they do not believe themselves to be capable of learning, or capable of writing cogently. As a teacher, I try to tell my students "Yes" as much as I can, to focus on the positive, to show them how they can build on their natural talents and what they already know.

Anyway, that's my pedagogical rant for the day. Now, I'm off to bed: gotta get up and sell them bagels tomorrow!  ;)

AP English, Revisited

I finally finished Rebecca, a book that I first read and loved when I was eighteen years old. I've already talked about it here, so there's not much to say except that rereading it has been a disappointment. For some reason, Rebecca lost all its appeal for me: instead of seeming rich, romantic, and relatable like it did in high school, it struck me this time as long-winded, sensational, and inauthentic. (I will say, though, that I was happily surprised by the ending, which I didn't remember at all. What a final paragraph!)

This weekend, I started reading another book that I haven't revisited since high school: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The novel is about the Igbo people, an African tribe that lived in Nigeria in the 1860s. It follows the life of Okonkwo, a rich and successful member of the Umuofia village who is riddled with fears and insecurities.

The first half of the novel describes Okonkwo's rise to eminence and relative happiness, but the second half (which I haven't started yet) tells of his fateful fall and the arrival of the first white missionaries in Nigeria.

 
In high school, I found Things Fall Apart to be flat, unsophisticated, and disturbing in its brutality. I think that I never gave the novel a chance: I assumed that we were reading it to be cheaply multicultural, and so I never looked beyond its anthropological details or its deceptively simple narrative style. I never stopped to think that my AP English teacher taught the novel alongside Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and The Canterbury Tales on purpose!

This time around, I've realized that Achebe is incredibly smart about people and their motives. Even though he's writing about a time and culture that is different from my own, I recognize his character types, their fears, desires, and ambitions. Instead of seeing Okonkwo as a wife-beating jerk with some real anger issues like I did in high school, I now see him as someone not unlike myself: I, too, have been known to work hard and act tough because I fear looking like a failure.

Anyway, I'm delighted that my opinion of this book has changed. Not only am I enjoying rereading it, but it makes me feel like I'm growing up a little. I can see a depth and sensitivity in Achebe's writing that I missed before. He reminds me of Dostoevsky and Jane Austen in that they all write honestly about the faults and foibles of real people. They understand that each individual is a mixed bag of rages and loves, fears and braveries, failures and successes.

I'm teaching Things Fall Apart in class over the next few weeks, and I'm excited to talk about it with my students. I wonder if they will love it, hate it, or feel indifferent toward it. We'll spend our class time talking about tragic heroes, Achebe's battle against racism and colonialism, and the importance of oral storytelling to the Igbo, but I'm most excited to talk about my students' experience of reading the novel. I hope that they will do a better job than I did of reading the novel for the first time; I hope that they will see the complexity behind its simple surface.

Update

Hi, folks! Long time, no blog!

I'll try to get back to blogging regularly soon. I'm finally getting my schedule under control. I've finished my application for the full-time teaching gig. I think it went really well--now I just have to wait and see!

This week, I've been learning a lot at my bakery-cafe. I have a big ol' slice on my thumb from a rogue bread slicer (yooowww!), but I've also learned how to slice bagels and bread safely by hand using a giant bread knife. I've learned how to make every sandwich in the shop and a few of the salads. I've baked cookies, scones, and baguettes in the industrial ovens. I'm starting to know the ingredients of most of the food that we sell. Come on in and ask me about the smoothies or the soups or the turkey sandwich--I dare ya!

The treacherous bread slicer looks something like this.

 

But this, for some reason, I can handle!

For my class, I've been reading up on literary criticism and literary theories. These theories are incredibly influential in contemporary literary scholarship, but I somehow made it through grad school without reading up on any of them (hmmmm, maybe I should have taken that Intro. to Critical Theory course everyone kept talking about . . . ).

 

Wearing glasses to class will make me look smarter, right? Right?!?

There's nothing like teaching something you've never studied before to set your heart racing and your palms sweating! It puts you in the same position as your students, but the difference is that you have to explain it to them, answer their questions, and sound like you know what the heck you're doing! Ack!

But now that I've gotten through the readings and given them a little thought, I feel well-prepared for tonight's class. There's nothing like learning on the fly to burn something into your memory for life. Well, except maybe scarring yourself on a bread slicer--I think that makes you learn even faster!

For both of my jobs, I've been on a very steep learning curve. It's been overwhelming sometimes, but I love it: my brain feels extra juicy and absorbent and active all the time. I love how busy I am these days. My hours are always filled (which leaves little time for blogging, writing poetry, and looking for other jobs), but it's a great change from the last six months--I got so sick of moping around like an unemployed lump on a log!

In conclusion, folks, things are going well. And one of these days, I'm going to have the time to bake and blog about this: Whoopie Pies, an old east coast favorite! I hope that they turn out just like the ones from the Amish farmers' markets in Pennsylvania!

Like all good things in the world, Whoopie Pies combine cake with frosting with more cake.

Busy-ness

I know, I know, I haven't posted here in awhile! My mother is pestering me daily about it. But my bloggerly absence must be forgiven for the following reasons:

1. I'm teaching Othello this week and giving my students their Midterm and reading up on literary criticism so that I can teach my students all about literary theory next week. It's the ickiest time of the semester, both for my students and myself.
2. I just started a new part-time job at a bakery/cafe in Lawrence. I like it a lot, but I'm pretty well whupped after every single shift. I'm not used to being on my feet that long, or carrying large coffee urns and dish tubs, or talking to that many people in a single day. I know that I'll get used to it in a few weeks, once my brain and body have adjusted, but right now, I'm doing a lot of passing out at 10:30. On the upside, I've learned how to use an industrial oven, how to make espresso, the difference between lattes and cappuccinos, and how to make some killer smoothies over the last few days. And that is awesome.
3. I'm finishing up my application for a full-time teaching job here in Kansas City. The job would be a great fit for me, but the application is a pain: it requires a full electronic application, a cover letter, a CV (a resume for academics), a teaching philosophy, and an essay about what a student should expect from me as a teacher. If I get it, the job will be more than worth the hassle of applying, but the process is sucking up all my writing juices right now! And so the blog suffers.
   

So there are my excuses, like them or not. I'll probably be slow about posting until early February, but I assure you that I haven't abandoned you, gentle readers! I'll be back, after many, many hours of sleep . . .

"Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)"

I've been reading a lot recently. Or maybe I should say that I've been reading a lot of different things recently, all at the same time.

As a little kid, I was addicted to books. I couldn't wait to start a new one, even if I hadn't finished the one that came right before it! This meant that I ended up reading four, five, or even six books at a time. I once took a backpack full of eleven books to stay overnight at my cousin's house--I was a fiend!

I liked to jump back and forth between each book, tasting a few chapters of Black Beauty before shuffling over to The Black Stallion (I had a thing for horses, what can I say!) before switching over to one of the Goosebumps books or to a Dr. Seuss book that my mom read to me when I was small, like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.

I'm sure that this ecclectic style of reading was caused mostly by a short attention span and too much enthusiasm for the next new thing. Yet, somehow, I managed to finish almost all of those books, even if I read them in ten page increments!

The last few weeks, I've been going back to my old habits and reading several books at once. I'm still working on Rebecca, but I'm also working my way through another Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novel (I'm on number seven now: Burnt Offerings). I've been listening to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead on my drives to and from Lawrence. I've also been sampling a few books of poetry, including William Carlos Williams's Sour Grapes and Louise Gluck's Ararat.

On top of those, I've also been furiously reading The New Yorker. Charlie bought me a subscription for my birthday, and I've loved every issue so far! The only problem is that there are too many interesting articles in each issue; I usually only have enough time to read two or three before the next issue arrives!

I love my new/old arrangement of reading so many things at once, sampling here and there, feeling edified by my New Yorker articles, excited by the wonderfully extravagant plots of Laruell K. Hamilton, and calmed by the wise old narrator of Gilead. Each thing I read seems to satisfy one part of me that the others cannot. And, week by week, my head is filled with such wildly different stories and thoughts and experiences that I feel enlivened by the variety of it all.

Last night, my class and I read a poem that reminded me of this experience. "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the first poems I read during high school, and it has always amazed me. I love the beauty of its language, the vibrant roughness of its sounds (read it aloud, I beg you!), its joyful message, and the sense of peace that always descends on me when I come to the last lines.

Every time I read this poem, I agree with Hopkins once again: it is the strangeness of this world, its overwhelming variety and frantic richness, that makes living such a wonderful thing.

---------------
Pied Beauty
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
           

    Glory be to God for dappled things—
        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
            For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
            And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
    All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
        Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
            With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
                                                Práise hím.

Teaching Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"

Sorry for the long break, folks! I've been unusually busy this week. I just started teaching a class for a local business college, so I've been elbow-deep in syllabi changes and student emails and on-line discussions.

My first class was last night, and it felt really good to be back in a classroom. I've missed interacting with students: the class clowns, the crazy-imaginative readings, the long discussions, and those electric moments of "ah ha!" insight.

We spent a big chunk of our class time discussing Alice Walker's "Everyday Use."  I'd never read much Walker before this class. I enjoyed The Color Purple a great deal, but I'd read it a long, long time ago, so "Everyday Use" was a revelation to me.

Alice Walker

"Everyday Use" is beautifully written, wonderfully smart, and subtle enough to make students really think. Walker's grasp of human nature is extraordinary, especially in her depiction of Dee, a college graduate and social climber who returns to her childhood home in the rural South. It's a story about what "heritage" really means, about embracing one's past honestly instead of exploiting it for social gains.

Walker's piece is ideal for a classroom because its characters are challenging and complex enough to inspire discussion, but its structure is simple enough to illustrate the basics of how short stories work. We used the story to discuss the standard elements of fiction (plot, character, point of view, etc.) and how plot is different from structure and theme. We also used it to talk about the importance of context when reading literature (understanding the Black Muslim movement makes Dee's character a little more accessible).

But our best discussions of the night came when we delved into why Dee's mother rejects her: my students were torn between appreciating Dee's desire for a better life and resenting how she treated her family. The complexity of Dee's character forced my students to really analyze her motives and what her past meant to her. They were forced to really focus in on the clues and characterizations that Walker sprinkled throughout the text.

Teaching this story reminded me that I'm at my best as a teacher when I'm passionate about the literature I'm teaching. I love to share great writing with my students, and I love it when I'm able to convey how damn cool a piece of literature is. I mean, anyone can write a story with a beginning (exposition), a middle (rising action), and an end (climax and resolution), but only a great writer can use such a simple form to illustrate how personal ambition and rapid social change can tear families apart. And making my students aware of that skill, aware of a writer's unique art and brilliance, is what makes my day as a teacher.

The High School Novel: Books that Everyone Should Read

Do you remember when Facebook let you search for the most popular activities, movies, and books that users list on their profiles? These stats were always fun to look at: you could see just how many young people in the U.S. played frisbee golf and listened to Weezer and were obsessed with the Harry Potter movies.

However, what always impressed me the most was the Favorite Books section. Harry Potter was, of course, always near the top, as were the Bible and The Da Vinci Code. But, surprisingly, the most commonly listed Favorite Books were classic high school reads like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

These are all great books--I know that I enjoyed them--but there are plenty of other books out there that are easier and more fun to read. There are also a lot of books out there that show more depth of thought and literary craftsmanship. Yet people's favorite books are neither the most entertaining nor the most profound novels available. So why are they so universally beloved?

Well, these tested and true High School Novels are wonderfully teachable: they strike a healthy compromise between depth, readability, and age appropriateness. Their ability to provoke thought while remaining accessible and inoffensive has made them the most widely taught and therefore the most widely read books in America. They're our universal texts--even people who aren't avid readers outside of a classroom have encountered them--and so, statistically speaking, these books are the most likely to be considered favorites.

In a very real way, our high school English teachers have placed these books at the center of the de facto American literary canon: everyone is expected to have read them, and they have become beloved symbols of our national culture. In this sense, being a high school English teacher is an awesome responsibility because the texts teachers assign will continue to have a huge impact on students and, arguably, our natural mindset and culture.

I've been thinking about this because I'm teaching an introductory literature course at a business college in the spring. This is the only literature course that my students will ever take at the university level, and I'm struck by the unexpected importance of my task. Statistically speaking, between 1/4 and 1/2 of my students will cease to be regular readers after they've turned in their final papers. The books that I teach them may become their lasting favorites and permanent influences on their way of thinking.

So what works should I choose for them? What books can they grow to love and learn the most from? Should I choose the books I love? Those that are the most emblematic of American literature? A wide, strange array to show literature's scope, or a traditional yet limited segment of stories? Should I choose the most morally edifying books (Huckleberry, I'm looking at you!), or should I choose great literary works whose message is less than inspiring (The Waste Land, anyone?)?

Perhaps I'm worrying about this too much. But when I think back to high school, I remember how little I knew and how important each new book seemed to me. What if I hadn't read The Grapes of Wrath as a junior and Jane Eyre as a senior? These are the kind of works that made me fall in love with literature, the books that made me want to be a writer, the books that really made me think.

And that sort of passion is all I want for my students: I want them to fall in love with a book that I assign at least once, in the hope that they'll become lifelong readers and fall in love again and again.

Clotheslines

Today, I came across an article about how residents in many areas are prohibited from using outdoor clotheslines. Sometimes they're prohibited by housing associations and sometimes by hostile neighborhood opinion, but the lines are always forbidden because of "aesthetics": neighbors think that the lines look "trashy" (read: they make the neighborhood look poor).

It seems incredible to me that people could be against clotheslines. Sure, if your neighbor has a clothesline, you have to look at his t-shirts and pajama pants, but I think it's kind of homey to see neighbors' clothing; it reminds me that other people live on my street, whether I see them in person or not!  Besides, using a clothesline lets the sun dry your clothes for free, reducing your electric bills and your carbon footprint. Saving money, helping the environment, a more colorful neighborhood--what's not to love?

I couldn't hang clothes outside during college or grad school. (Usually, even if an apartment complex gives you a tiny patch of land or a deck, you're still not allowed to actually do anything with the space.) But my parents still have a clothesline that I convinced them to install when I was in high school. I'm a big fan of it.

But it wasn't until I read the article that I remembered that we had a line at all. Ours is a retractable model: you pull the line out of its case when you need it, attach the end of the line to a hook screw, and then let the line whip back up into its case when you're all done.

 

I didn't use the line all summer, and when I went out to check on it this afternoon, I realized why: the retractable line was all knotted up inside the plastic case, and the case itself was about to fall off the shed wall. I couldn't yank the line out, so I resorted to "fixing it" (translation: I broke the brittle case off the shed wall, whacked it with a hammer, popped the case in half, dodged the sharp metal spring that whipped past my head, and then reattached the freed line to the shed via an old nail). As you can see, the fix worked quite nicely.  ;)

I started hanging clothes outside for environmental reasons, but I also like the process because it reminds me of Mrs. Gretencord, my second grade teacher. She lived down the street from me when I was growing up. She had four clothes lines in her back yard that ran between two thick metal T-shaped poles.Whenever I walked past her house, I would see her clothes danging in the wind beside her husband's pants and, occasionally, his underpants. Being a seven-year-old, I always giggled to see them, but I also shivered at the thought of pulling on a pair of boxers that had been hanging outside on a windy January day!

Mrs. Gretencord also had a clothesline hung in her busy little classroom at Central Elementary School. She used the clothesline during our reading units. We'd read a book together as a class, and when we were all done, Mrs. Gretencord would hang a copy of the book's cover on the line with a little clothespin. The books would hang in the classroom for the rest of the quarter to remind us what we had accomplished. I remember staring at the covers everyday: Mr. Popper's Penguins, The Chalk Box Kid, and The Mouse and the Motorcycle. Mrs. Gretencord is probably why I love book covers so much.

I count Mrs. Gretencord as one of my favorite teachers; she never stopped encouraging me and caring about me, even when I was all grown up. Even in high school, I still stopped by her house to chat and to tell her how school was going.

She finally retired a few years ago and moved out of her old house, but I hear that she still volunteers at Central Elementary because she misses being around the kids. I bet she still hangs her laundry outside, too, retired or not, and regardless of whether it's July or December.

"final as a plum tree"

The family cats are behaving strangely today. Earlier, I heard a mysterious mewling coming from the hallway, but I couldn't find the source. Later, washing my face in the bathroom, I heard it again and opened a cabinet door to find Diego, our staid old man cat, sitting on a ledge shelf, staring at me with his haughty, green, fishy eyes. He didn't want to be let out, just for me to be aware of his impressive existence there beneath the sink. I shut the door and kept on rinsing.

A much younger Diego trying to get himself mailed to the wild Amazonian jungles.

I've tried to write poems about cats before, but like oranges, I can't seem to grapple with them. They're too strange, too lovely to write about. However, the following poem by Charles Bukowski is a very successful cat poem. (You can hear Garrison Keillor read it on The Writer's Almanac archives.) To me, it captures cat-ness beautifully.

It's also a great poem to teach to beginning writers: it's a spare little piece that's easy to "get," but its similes and metaphors are fantastic, transformational. Bukowski turns the cat into a god, a machine, and a plum tree, and each metamorphosis inches us a little bit closer to Bukowski's vision of the cat's essential nature. Each comparison is a little slant; it doesn't make perfect sense that a plum tree is "final," nor does it make sense that a plum tree is like a cat, but we still feel what Bukowski means instinctively. It's a great simile because it's unexpected and brief and strange and oh so right.

When Bukowski walks the cat out of the poem beneath "porticoes of [his] / admiration," we see the cat one last time, sashaying through a temple of worship, as preening and pleased with himself as any Roman emperor or Greek god.

I swear, this cat could have been Diego.

---------------

startled into life like fire


By Charles Bukowski

in grievous deity my cat
walks around
he walks around and around
with
electric tail and
push-button
eyes

he is
alive and
plush and
final as a plum tree

neither of us understands
cathedrals or
the man outside
watering his
lawn

if I were all the man
that he is
cat--
if there were men
like this
the world could
begin

he leaps up on the couch
and walks through
porticoes of my
admiration.

My Contemporary Literature Reading List

!!!!!

That's the only way I can type how I feel right now. I just got off the phone with a dean from a local university. I had applied for a teaching position there about a month ago. Since the school is a self-described "career-minded" college, I had assumed that they'd want me to teach composition or business writing or something similarly work-intensive and tedious. But the dean said that they would want me to teach a 400-level Humanities course in Contemporary Literature.

Again, !!!!!

The reason this is so exciting is that most adjunct lecturers (meaning lecturers who teach part-time and who aren't in tenure-track professorships) with English degrees are usually forced to teach a very limited array of composition courses semester after semester. At Penn State, full-time lecturers could teach intro to composition, business writing, technical writing, and writing in the humanities. If the lecturer worked really hard and hung around long enough and earned high enough student evaluations, he or she would be given a single coveted section of creative writing or literature appreciation. And that's a big "if."

So I'm absolutely thrilled at the opportunity to teach literature for this school. Of course, there's still the interview to get through, and maybe I will decide that this particular university is not for me. But I'm excited enough that I've already compiled a tentative reading list for a Contemporary Lit. course.

This particular university runs on 8-week sessions, meaning that I'd only have class time for 8 books at most. And really, if you take into account time for papers and tests, 6 books/reading units would be best. On a 6-week schedule, I'd allocate 3 weeks for novels, 1 week for short fiction, 1 week for drama, and 1 week for poetry.

Here's the reading list for my dream Contemporary Literature course, off the top of my head. Please feel free to suggest additions in the comments section!

Novels:
1) Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (or maybe Gilead, since it won the Pulitzer)
2) Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (or The Road to exploit the movie tie-in)
3) Junot Diaz's The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao

Short Stories:
1) Alice Munro (I don't know what I'd pick, but she'd definitely be in there)
2) Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
3) Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"
4) Selections from some contemporary short story anthology

Drama:
1) Tom Stoppard's Arcadia

Poetry:
1) Selections from The Best American Poetry 2009
2) Selections from Mary Oliver's American Primitive (Oliver's great for people who are new to poetry)
3) Selections from Billy Collins's Picnic, Lightening (also good for beginners, and funny, too)
4) Selections from Lynne Emanuel's Then, Suddenly--
5) Selections from Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary

So, my dear reader, would you take my class?

"Writing Is Just Thinking on Paper"

I spent yesterday morning revising a writing sample for a job application. As usual, I found myself struggling to keep my word count down. Wordiness is my great flaw as a writer; I tend to compose long complex sentences with too many words and too many ideas. I know, now, to be wary of my own prolixity, to be generous with my periods and quick with the delete button, regardless of whether I'm writing a blog post, a poem, or a cover letter.

Every writer has something they struggle with, no matter who they are or what they're writing. I think that the first step to being a good writer is psychological: it's accepting that writing is always a struggle and knowing that you have weaknesses as well as strengths, bad writing habits as well as innate talents.

Most beginning writers don't understand that writing is hard, hard work. The 18-year-olds I taught at Penn State liked to believe that writing was anything but struggle and revision and an uphill battle against language itself. In my composition and creative writing courses, there were a few expressions of this resistance that I heard again and again:

1) "Writing cannot be taught." Usually, this one reared its ugly head in creative writing courses and was used as an excuse to ignore constructive criticism. Because my writing has been wonderfully improved by reading great writers, listening to the advice of my brilliant professors, and scouring pages and pages of feedback from my workshop classmates, I'm almost offended when students tell me this. Not only does it devalue my teaching, but it seems to insult the many people whose knowledge, time, and generosity was invaluable to my development. In a classroom, learning how to write happens slowly, it's true, in small, nearly invisible increments that never seem like much on their own, but these changes add up over time. Besides, talent is just a starting point, not a free ride to success; you have to develop what you've been given, not stubbornly refuse to get better than you already are.

Maybe it's true that writing cannot be taught, at least not to an unwilling mind; it has to be actively learned by a dedicated student through practice, close observation, and the awareness that they can always be better.

2) "My writing is personal, and critiquing this poem is like criticizing who I am." People get all upset when you say critical things about their writing. I do it, you do it, we all do it. This happens because writing so often reflects our thoughts, and our thoughts are, in some way, ourselves. This means that our writing can sometimes feel like ourselves on paper. This thinking is natural, but it's also not true. Words are just words, and the way we put them together is a matter of instinct and accident and choice; our ideas can be expressed in a million different ways, and good writing is about finding the best possible way to do this. So if I tell a student that their story's plot doesn't make sense, that doesn't mean that they are illogical and faulty, just that their words aren't yet doing the work they were intended to do.

3) "Good writing just happens because of inspiration. If the writing isn't good, then I wasn't inspired and it's not my fault." First, "inspiration" can apply to ideas, but not to the medium expressing the ideas (in this case, words). If the sentences and images and paragraphs are crappy, you can't blame that on a lack of inspiration, just on a lack of revision. Second, even ideas usually need mental "revising"; that's what brainstorming, outlining, and thesis-writing are for: to take an idea from a hunch to a cohesive and persuasive argument. Do you think Shakespeare's plays just sort of happened? Or that the Declaration of Independence was knocked off in a half hour? Or that Descartes got to "I think, therefore I am" one afternoon while paddling in his bathtub?

That being said, there are a few instances of good writing spurting forth naturally. It happens to everyone once in a while, but even Allen Ginsberg spent months revising Howl and Jack Kerouac tinkered with On the Road before he published it. Anyone who's written for any length of time will tell you that revision is far more important than inspiration. I've revised this post about four times before I published it, and this is just a rant for a blog. So there.

4) "Judging writing's quality is subjective and based on personal opinion; therefore, no one should grade another person's writing." Most students who say this have never read really bad writing. In English classes, students are usually exposed to the best literature ever written, so they don't understand how difficult it is to read shoddily constructed, grammatically confusing, logically flimsy writing (only English teachers and publishers have to do that). Sentences with faulty grammar, paragraphs with convoluted structure, and essays with no clear message are all difficult to understand and remember. Any practiced reader can tell the difference between good writing (which calls little attention to itself because of its orderly, logical, elegant construction) and bad writing (which requires a furrowed brow and much rereading to understand).

I agree that preferring Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner is a matter of taste, but preferring Faulkner to the average freshman student's essay has nothing to do with opinion.

---------------
I once got a fortune cookie that said "Writing is just thinking on paper," and, by God, I wish it was (wouldn't my life be easy then!). What this fortune cookie and most beginning writers don't understand is that writing is not quick or easy or a mirror-like reflection of the self. Heck, it's not even about pleasing oneself. Public writing (meaning classroom papers and published articles and creative writing) cannot be judged solely by the standards of its author. Writing is a social task, one that is dependent on the reader's comfort and understanding. No one would consider themselves a good conversationalist if their small talk amused them but always left their partner confused, annoyed, or bored, and the same is true for writing. Learning how to write well is not about practicing direct personal expression; it is about learning how to let go of your solipsism, to gain awareness of the world outside of you, and to express oneself carefully so that your readers can really hear what you have to say.